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In late 2023, I wrote afeature for The Vergeexploring the FCC's attempt to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not onlyrefused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas(despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they've provably charged poor and minority neighborhoods significantlymore moneyfor worse [...]

By now you likely have caught wind of GameStop, the video game and collectables retailer, announcing a bid to buy eBay. Perhaps you heard of this, as I did, because of GameStop's CEO, Ryan Cohen, showing up to CNBC's Squawk Box program where he pulled off one of the strangest interviews about business I've ever [...]

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 [...]

Utah has a long track record of short-sighted internet policymaking, but the latest example really does take things to a new level of stupid. As of yesterday, Utah's Online Age Verification Amendments" bill, Senate Bill 73, has taken effect. It is a piece of legislation that effectively tries to ban VPNs as a desperate attempt [...]

The cops never change. Only the tech toys do. That's the upshot of this report from the Institute for Justice, which has been tracking what cops have been tracking now that they have always-on access to massive networks of security cameras, including Flock Safety's controversial offerings, which also include automatic license plate readers (ALPR). The [...]

Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you'll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, [...]

John Roberts has spent years whining about how totally unfair it is that people claim he and his colleagues rule based on partisan leanings. He did it in 2014. He did it in 2017. He did it in 2019. Hell, he did it a couple months ago too. So it's little surprise that he's out [...]

Anna Gomez, the FCC's lone Democratic Commissioner (because Republicans refuse to seat the second one) is calling for a rigorous review of Paramount and the Ellison family's planned $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers. As Paramount recently revealed, 49.5 percent of the deal's funding comes from Middle East and Chinese government-linked sources; just the sort [...]

We all should know by now that Nintendo is incredibly protective of its IP. When it comes to anything having to do with Pokemon specifically, all the more so. While they would tell you that they're just protecting their IP, the end result is that some of the biggest Pokemon fans out there that just [...]

The content of their character was never up for consideration. Under Donald Trump, the only thing that matters is the color of their skin. That's why almost every single person granted asylum since Trump took office has been white. That's why Trump has been asking (out loud!) why we keep getting migrants from shithole" countries [...]

Perhaps Matt Taibbi's most famous bit of writing ever was his takedown of Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone (and then in a book that followed) that opened with the highly evocative metaphor: The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into [...]

It may be almost impossible to devolve this country into a nation of slaveholders, but the Trump administration and all of its MAGA buddies are working hard to make sure a white person's vote counts more than a vote cast by anyone else. These bigots recently got an assist from the Supreme Court, which decided [...]

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, [...]

California recently passed a law that will, in practice, cause AI chatbots to respond to any hint of emotional distress by spamming users with 988 crisis line numbers, or by cutting off the conversation entirely. The law requires chatbot providers to implement a protocol for preventing the production of suicidal ideation" if they're going to [...]

Last week the Trump FCC quietly announced that it was cooking up a new ban on any labs that have testing offices in China from testing electronic devices such as smartphones, cameras and computers for sale in the United States. That's going to create some major issues given that roughly 75% of all U.S.-bound electronics [...]

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 Callais 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 [...]