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Here's something no one but cops and the tech firms that love cops wanted: an ALPR that can scoop up pretty much any information being broadcasted by cars and the devices carried by the people inside them. As if ALPRs weren't already controversial enough, here comes a tech company offering that makes most ALPRs (including [...]

We've been pointing out for years that the supposedly free speech absolutist" Elon Musk is one of the most aggressive abusers of state power to create chilling effects against his critics. So it should come as little surprise to anyone paying attention, that he's at it again: threatening to sue Rep. Ro Khanna for Khanna's [...]

In Trump's America, the First Amendment is a dead letter. If you're seen as anti-Trump, you apparently no longer have any rights at all. We'll get to the man who moved a box of zines and got thirty years - he wasn't even at the protest, but the judge claimed he was aiding a terrorist [...]

There aren't many governments out there actually trying to be more transparent. Every so often, a law gets passed that benefits the public more than its benefits the government, but these are the exceptions, not the rule. California experienced one of these anomalies fairly recently. In 2019, a law was passed that finally made police [...]

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In theory, there's a way to build a prediction market that actually provides valuable insight on issues through the wisdom of the crowds. But that's not at all what we have with the current crop of prediction markets, mainly Kalshi and Polymarket, which seem to have leap-frogged FanDuel and DraftKings as the deservedly hated gambling [...]

Earlier this year America's idiot king offered a no-bid contract to one of his ex-con Mara Lago donors to fix" the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It... did not go well. Said pool is now full of algae and peeling paint, and it's created an interesting attention flashpoint for the press and another perfect metaphor for [...]

I recognize that when we talk about AI generally, and specifically AI in the gaming industry, there are some people out there who will simply dogmatically insist that this technology doesn't have a place in the industry and never will. This typically comes along with two chief concerns: concerns about artistic expression if AI is [...]

Afew weeks ago,Walled Culture wrote about Hadopi, France's infamous copyright enforcement mechanism. The so-called graduated response" - aka three strikes and you are out" - has been around for over 15 years now, has cost French taxpayers a fortune, and has never achieved any of its aims. As the Walled Culture post suggested, the latest [...]

Last week the FTC decided to file an obviously censorial, legally baseless lawsuit against an educational non-profit in an attempt to punish the organization for its speech in a manner that is clearly way outside the bounds of the FTC's authority. The case serves no purpose other than to punish an organization for its speech... [...]

Yeah, that's a shame. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy bigger asshole. It's as if Trump asked his underlings to generate the perfect metaphor for his second administration and they fucking nailed it. Trump has tried to impose his self-gratification on an event even he can't possibly hope to destroy: the 250th anniversary [...]

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England imposing the Stamp Act on the American colonies back in 1765 was one of the final moves that pushed those colonies into open revolt for their independence. The law sought to tax printed communications, and England justified it by saying it was needed to pay for British soldiers in the colonies. That it also [...]

ABC continues to send signals that it actually intends to fight back against Brendan Carr's clumsy efforts to censor the network's comedians and journalists. As Mike noted last week, the public had until Monday, June 22 to file public comment with the FCC about the agency's ongoing censorship efforts. Part of those efforts have involved [...]

Well, this is very disappointing. Over the first half of this year, we've talked about the resurgence of the Stop Killing Games movement, which aims to push various governments to legislate out the practice of video game publishers sunsetting their games and making them unplayable afterwards. The aims of the movement are simple: publishers can [...]

What do EFF staffersSarah Chen,Javier Morales,Caitlin Chin,Emma Rodriguez, andMikko Kopponenhave in common? For one thing, they don't exist. For another, all have been quoted as EFF experts in articles published in the past two months on a site calledNews-USA Today, whichdescribes itselfas an independent news publisher focused on clear, accurate, and useful journalism." Uh... (Please [...]

In mid-May, the Todd Blanche-run DOJ agreed to settle" the fake case Donald Trump had brought against his own IRS. The settlement"? A $1.776 billion fund to pay reparations to the MAGA faithful. Much of that money was expected to flow to January 6th insurrectionists - many of them convicted of actual crimes that Trump [...]

The Trump Organization still hasn't shipped their promised Trump made in America" phone to most of the customers who laid down a $100 deposit a year ago. But they did recently start to ship early review copies to a handful of outlets and preferred cultists. What outlets generally found wasn't surprising: it's a pretty substandard [...]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, [...]

The Sixth Circuit just handed Ohio a win on its social media law restricting minors, and reading the majority opinion, it's immediately obvious why: the court fell hook, line, and sinker for the moral panic that social media is inherently poisonous to children. The first few pages of the decision are nothing but cherry-picked, out-of-context [...]

It's no secret ICE officers are using their phones and their tech toys to do way more than they'll openly admit to doing. Tech tools that can be abused will be abused. And ICE has plenty of those, including an app that's supposed to be used for verification" of migrant status, but is just facial [...]

This week, MrWilson takers both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it's a comment about the growing global threat of internet age gates: One of the biggest benefits of the internet is the ability to talk to people outside your personal sphere. It's similar to the exposure to diversity that a lot [...]

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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 [...]

I can't say I know for sure that Stephen Colbert is a Techdirt reader, but I very much believe he is. His interests align somewhat with ours, he often comments on some of the same topics we do, and, it turns out, he decided to troll his previous employer during his last show in a [...]

In a voice vote last week, the House of Representatives passedH.R. 6028, the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act." The legislation is presented as a technical reorganization of some government agencies, but it's much more than that. H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office, and not in a good way. The bill removes the [...]

Senators Ron Wyden and Ted Cruz have released the JAWBONE Act (Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression Act") as a way to prevent government suppression of speech. While some of the premises behind it are silly and nonsensical, the actual law is not bad. Of course, if it became law, the Trump admin [...]

Here it is: the dumbest defense of automatic license plate readers I've ever read. While we can subtract some points because the person writing it has no power to install/un-install/cover in garbage bags surveillance tech, he's a regular contributor to a long-running newspaper in a major city. And since this paper is still willing to [...]

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If there's one thing that Donald Trump has shown over the years, it's that he will get his most sycophantic MAGA loyalists to insist there are perfectly obvious reasons why whatever he's about to do is absolutely necessary... and then Trump will do the opposite, and all those hangers-on will magically change their story within [...]

For a long time organizations like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk's xAI data center in Memphis disproportionately pollutes the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn't even bother to get the necessary permits to [...]

We were just talking about how angry RFK Jr. was at a report that he's been out to lunch on most of what HHS' work entails, choosing instead to focus his time and attention on his own pet interests, like curtailing vaccine programs in America, chasing chemtrails, and a newfound love for snake-handling. Kennedy denied [...]

The internet is anessential resourcefor young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves-both inside countries and across continents. Yet governments around the world continue to introduce and implement legislation requiring all online users to verify their ages before accessing the digital space. In some cases, politicians are going further, putting forth [...]

You have less than a week to weigh in on Brendan Carr's obviously bullshit retaliatory censorial attack on Disney. While it's quite clear that Carr is likely to ignore the comments, they still very much matter. It needs to be in the public record that the public is against this attack on free speech and [...]

The US military has engaged in extrajudicial killings via drone strikes since it was first shown this tech could be used to murder people. The War on Terror has given us more than two decades of drone strikes - all of which have used war-related justifications to excuse them without the actual authorization of Congress. [...]

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On Friday, the government's Section 702 surveillance authority lapsed! It may be temporary, but it's still an important milestone. Section 702 was one of the surveillance programs Ed Snowden exposed in 2013 - and even after the exposure, the NSA has continued abusing it to spy on Americans. It's the tool that lets the NSA [...]

CNN brass have been waiting to get federal approval of their problematic $111 billion merger with Paramount. As we've detailed exhaustively, the high debt load from the CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers merges is going to result in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and sagging quality control at the resulting company. It's what always happens. It's [...]

There's something going on over in Microsoft's Xbox division and it isn't good. Don't take my word on that. Apparently the bosses over there are circulating an email to staff talking about how properly fucked everyone is if something doesn't change soon. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty just sent [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. Duringa Washington Nationals baseball gameon May 17, 2026, three peopleunfurled a large bannerfrom the upper deck of Nationals Park displaying a link to a white nationalist website. The website, warning of the replacement of whites by people of color, called forthe deportation [...]

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is not having a particularly good time of being the UK's leader. Basically everyone thinks he's doing a terrible job and it seems unlikely that he'll be in the role much longer. Apparently desperate to turn the tide on being historically disliked, he's decided to grab the most reliable life [...]

Yesterday we wrote about the Trump administration forcing Anthropic to shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The short version: dumb. Today, Axios got White House officials on the record, and it turns out the real reason is even dumber than we thought. In that original piece, we had pointed out that cybersecurity expert Katie [...]

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 [...]

Just once I'd like to see this administration engage in the slightest bit of subtlety. Just once. It would be a refreshing change from literally everything it has done during this current iteration. Sure, it's easier to prove actions are vindictive if they're transparently vindictive. On the other hand, too many courts and judges (which [...]

Last week Elon Musk successfully conned America and U.S. regulators into signing off on his preposterous SpaceX IPO, which immediately generated Musk $75 billion by comically over-stating the value of SpaceX, xAI, and Starlink. Then bone-grafting the entire pile of bullshit to the U.S. economy and your retirement account under the pretense that space data [...]

We should all know at this point that RFK Jr. is bad at his job as Secretary of HHS. But that simplistic statement apparently needs something of a qualifier. Instead, it appears we should say that RFK Jr. is bad at the parts of his job that he chooses to do. Because, according to a [...]

What's most disturbing about Trump's Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" executive order isn't its fully-blinkered, jingoistic take on American history where America does no wrong and is almost always white right. I mean, that's pretty awful on its own, but it's the flip side of pretending whites do no wrong: pretending any victims [...]

The Trump Department of Justice's" antitrust division" dumped its unsurprising approval of the terrible Paramount Warner Brothers merger late on Friday in the hopes people wouldn't notice it. As we've noted the $111 billion megadeal is a historically harmful mess. Backed by billions in Saudi and Chinese cash (raising all sorts of foreign media influence [...]

Late Friday, Anthropic shut down access to its just-released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after the Trump administration slapped export controls on them - treating cutting-edge AI, in other words, like weapons. The trigger, it turns out, was a jailbreak. And the entity that tipped off the government? Amazon - one of Anthropic's biggest [...]

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