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While we've taken some issues with his approach to copyright laws and enforcement in the past, there is no doubting that Steven Soderbergh is a filmmaking legend. This is a man who directed films like Traffic and Ocean's 11. He talks about, and cares about, the art of filmmaking. And he's apparently beginning to use [...]

The NYPD's biggest union is back in lawsuit mode. As usual, the impetus is accountability and transparency - things the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) and NYPD have been opposed to since their respective inceptions. A law put on the books 50 years ago was finally erased 40 years after its enactment. 50-a" allowed the NYPD [...]

Last December, Justice Alito told Texans they had to vote under an unconstitutional gerrymander because changing maps in December would deprive them of certainty" before the 2026 midterms. Yesterday, with voting already underway in Louisiana, he rushed the certified copy of the Calais ruling out the door so Southern states can hurry up and redistrict [...]

Flock Safety's reputation is in tatters, thanks in large part to its own actions. First sold as a high-tech add-on for homeowners' associations and gated communities, it soon spread to law enforcement agencies and the cities that employ them. Promising plenty of access to an existing network of privately-owned cameras, Flock insinuated - if not [...]

Adobe Lightroom is a cloud-based photo editing and organizing tool designed for photographers of all levels. With an intuitive interface and advanced features, it allows you to create stunning images, manage your photo library, and work seamlessly across desktop, mobile, and web. Lightroom Classic provides robust tools for handling large volumes of images, offering precise [...]

A key takeaway of the Trump II admin is that they came in declaring a whole bunch of things to be stupid and worth ripping apart, only to later realize how important and structurally necessary those things were, and then rush to recreate them in a much sloppier, worse version. Now they're doing it with [...]

Good news if you really enjoy corporatism, autocracy, propaganda and a violently misinformed electorate! The U.S. has fallen to sixty-fourth place (now below Ukraine) in the annual Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index. As corrupt, oligarch-coddled authoritarians the world over continue to enjoy their moment in the sun, journalism (aka the enemy of [...]

The Trump administration's war on science has been a furious one. Be it deep cuts to scientific research, policies that ignore scientific research, or the appointment of deeply unscientific people to lead scientific cabinet positions, it seems that Trump thinks that knowledge is the enemy. You will recall how RFK Jr. fired every single member [...]

If you want to overthrow Big Tech, you'll need Section 230. The paradigm shift being built with the Open Social Web can put communities back in control of social media infrastructure, and finally end our dependency on enshittified corporate giants. But while these incumbents can overcomemultimillion-dollar lawsuits, the small host revolution could be picked off [...]

The administration isn't exactly winning here. The GOP has been opposed to a clean reauthorization since its first brush with warrantless surveillance back during the Biden administration. GOP members weren't upset that the FBI routinely abused the NSA's Section 702 collections to access US persons' communications... unless those communications happened to be theirs. Despite their [...]

We have all wanted to learn a language at some point but it's hard to get started. Some language learning tools can be complicated and very time-consuming. But with uTalk, you'll be speaking keywords and phrases in no time, and will start to see the results straight away. It helps you overcome the language barrier [...]

In late 2024, Donald Trump sued CBS for $10 billion claiming election interference" because 60 Minutes had the audacity to (*gasp*) edit a Kamala Harris interview down for broadcast. The lawsuit was, on its face, ridiculous - editing interviews is protected First Amendment activity, the kind of editorial discretion that has been the entire premise [...]

The anti-vaccine sugar rush that has infected some portions of the country, largely thanks to the profane appointment of RFK Jr. to head HHS, is incredibly frustrating. That makes it all the more important when the movement receives not just pushback when trying to enact absurd policy based on conspiracy theories, but specifically when that [...]

FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent much of the last five years on cable TV whining incessantly about foreign entanglement with U.S. companies. Even companies he doesn't regulate. He was positively apoplectic about China's ownership of TikTok, which you may recall they fixed" by offloading the social media company to Trump's billionaire friends (while curiously [...]

This week, n00bdragon takes both top spots in the insightful side. In first place, it's a comment about Trump's latest attempt to get Jimmy Kimmel fired: What gets me the most confused is that Kimmel gave his monologue multiple days before the WHCD. No one objected at the time. No one, not even the administration, [...]

We've arrived at the end of our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1930! We've already covered the Best Adaptation, Best Deep Cut, Best Visuals, Best Remix, and Best Digital Game winners, and now we're wrapping things up with a look at [...]

A quick reminder: America has not had a confirmed Surgeon General at the federal level since January of 2025. Yes, that's over a year ago. How we got here is a microcosm of the Trump administration generally: chaos, misfires, and the wrong people at the very top. Janette Nesheiwat was Trump's first nominee. MAGA gremlin [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. As an asylum-seeker living in the U.S., Jasmir Urbina worried as she watched violence break out amid the military-style immigration sweeps across the country. Then she read about legal residents being arrested at immigration court and wondered when federal agents would set their sights on her [...]

I will continue to make the case for a 100 Justice Supreme Court because we need to get to the point that no single Supreme Court Justice matters. As it stands, each individual Justice has way too much power, and when they go mad with it, they can undermine the very structure of democracy. And [...]

Shortly before the Supreme Court inflicted enormous damage on the Voting Rights Act, the Reconstruction Amendments of the Constitution, any pretense of constitutionally guaranteed Equal Protection, the civil rights movement, its credibility, and our democracy writ large with its Alito-penned decision in Louisiana v. Callais, it released a separate decision in First Women's Choice Resource [...]

Capture emotions and tell stories through photography with the Photography Master Class Bundle. Transform your skills with six diverse courses, including Portrait Photography, DSLR Photography, Wedding Photography, Off Camera Flash photography, and more. Whether you're a beginner or experienced, this bundle offers a wealth of knowledge and techniques to enhance your craft. It's on sale [...]

Former judge Roy Moore made quite a name for himself while attempting to convert his sketchy judicial career into a presumably equally sketchy career as US senator. Prior to his run for office in the 2018 mid-term election, Moore had already been suspended from the Alabama bench for a long list of violations: A normal [...]

Brendan Carr's FCC claims to be moving forward their their plan to review ABC's broadcast licenses" because Jimmy Kimmel made a joke about the president's wife. And it's every bit as dumb and legally baseless as you might expect. Carr has sent a letter to ABC/Disney saying he's accelerating the review of their existing broadcast [...]

Over a decade ago, Microsoft was getting set to release its new Xbox One console. In the lead-up to launch day, a bunch of rumors began swirling about some of the online requirements the console would come with. Details weren't to be found, so the public was left to speculate what these requirements would entail. [...]

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 [...]

Lawmakers in Congress are moving quickly on theGUARD Act,an age-gating billrestricting minors' access to a wide range of online tools, with a key vote expected this week. The proposal is framed as a response to alarming cases involving AI companions" and vulnerable young users. But the text of the bill goes much further, and could [...]

There's a famous Mitchell & Webb sketch where two SS officers, mid-conversation on the Eastern Front, suddenly notice something troubling about their uniforms. Hans," one asks, peering at his cap, are we the baddies?" The skulls had been there the whole time. The skulls are kind of a giveaway. But it took a while for [...]

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Not that ICE was ever that great about taking care of all the people it detains. It certainly wasn't during Trump's first term. The DHS Inspector General released a report that said there were numerous problems in a single detention facility. Not only that but what was contained in the report was incomplete because the [...]

More than 4,000 Hollywood insiders recently signed a letter blasting Paramount's planned $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, noting that the massive consolidation will be very harmful to labor, consumers, and creatives. As we saw with the AT&T Warner deal, history generally supports this; these debt-riddled deals are broadly, uniformly harmful. Companies that take on [...]

You're all sick of me saying we need to have more nuance in the discussion about AI use in the gaming industry. I get it. I'm also not going to stop. And I hope you will have noticed that I have called for nuance in both directions. While I'm more optimistic than many in our [...]

As numerous posts on this blog have emphasised, the underlying idea ofopen access(OA) - allowing anyone to read and share published academic research for free - is great in principle, but in practice has failed in important ways. That's because traditional academic publishers have subverted the open access model to such an extent that the [...]

Raids and arrests around the nation by federal immigration officers all feature the same thing: a bunch of people in masks shoving people into unmarked vehicles. What's happening under Trump during his second term doesn't feel like America. And it certainly doesn't look like America. Instead, it looks like the actions of paramilitary jump-out squads, [...]

James Comey is not exactly someone we've ever been a fan of on Techdirt. He was a terrible FBI director in so many ways. We've spent years criticizing the man - for his crusade against encryption, his supporting the FBI's ridiculously aggressive impersonation of reporters, his embrace of the FBI's program to coerce and entrap [...]

Across 30 hours of instructor-led content, you'll learn how to diagnose different kinds of cybersecurity attacks and how to defeat them in the Complete Ethical Hacking Course. You'll practice all the skills and techniques in real-time using an ethical hacking lab so you can put your learning to the test. You'll experience real-time hacking examples [...]

The administration's anti-migrant tactics are now months into an indefinite period of continuous escalation. That protest efforts have escalated alongside it apparently means nothing to the officials spearheading this brazen attack on non-white people. It wasn't until federal officers began killing people in front of witnesses that the administration decided to dial things back a [...]

Anonymous insiders tell the access journalists at Semafor that Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr is cooking up a review" of ABC broadcast licenses after Jimmy Kimmel once again made the President sad. The FCC clearly leaked word of the inquiry to Semafor in the hopes that Semafor would present it as a serious, big boy [...]

We discussed RFK Jr.'s recent appearance before Congress, where he bravely declared that the current measles outbreak in America has absolutely nothing to do with him, despite that definitely not being true. But, unsurprisingly, that wasn't the only craziness that Kennedy put on display in the hearing. The Secretary of HHS doesn't believe in the [...]

There's stilla meaningful 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. Alaska [...]

Apparently we've reached the stage of the second Trump presidency when we're doing reruns of the old hits. As you'll recall, Donald Trump has been desperate to get late-night TV host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel fired for quite some time. While Trump has long complained about any late night comedian making fun of him, he [...]

There have been plenty of absolutely batshit crazy legal filings from Trump and his crew over the last few years, but a filing last night takes the crazy to new levels. This is in the case filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation against the National Park Service over the ballroom Donald Trump is [...]

Simplify your daily charging experience and replace most of the chargers and cables on your desktop, with this one mini station that does it all. The Magstand Mini Magnetic Charge Station is a mini charging station that features 3 wireless charging spots, one USB-A port, and can also double as a bedside lamp with 2 [...]

Under Trump, DHS, ICE, CBP, and Border Patrol have violated every single right affected by their daily work. When you're trying to perform 3,000 arrests per day, you can be slowed down by things like the Constitution. And these agencies certainly haven't been slowed. In fact, they've been encouraged to continue violating rights by being [...]

Late last monthwe noted howthe Trump FCC under Brendan Carr announced a new ban" on all routers made overseas (which means pretty much all of them). At the time, we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for conditional [...]

Progress may be slow, but it's still progress. While I've been talking about the importance of video game preservation as a function of our own overall cultural preservation, very few people out there are actually trying to do something about it all. One of those doers has been Ross Scott and others involved in the [...]

As its name suggests, generative AI is designed to generate material in response to prompts by drawing on its probabilistic database built up through analyzing huge quantities of training input. But it can draw on those patterns to analyze other files, and that's also a widely used application. Writing in The Argument, Kelsey Piper encountered [...]

The DOJ continues to be the Trump Administration's preferred avenue of vengeance. Since his return to office, multiple prosecutions targeting the president's critics and political opponents have been mounted. To date, not a single one has succeeded. (And more than a few have been stalled completely by Trump's refusal to engage in the legally required [...]

One of the more frustrating things about the case in which Donald Trump sued the IRS that he runs, demanding $10 billion over nothing, was that it seemed like it might just work, and there might be nothing that could be done to stop it. But at least one federal judge (luckily the one overseeing [...]

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The patron saint of the debate me, bro" grift is getting his due as most saints do: posthumously. The best thing that ever could have happened to people perpetrating violent left" bullshit was Charlie Kirk being shuffled off this mortal coil by the predictable end result of his divisive, racist, bullying speech. What should have [...]