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Last year you might recall how Elon Musk's far right wing extremism (and endlessly incoherent behavior) had many countries reconsidering their use of his low-Earth orbit satellite company, Starlink. It was driven by the fact that Musk had restricted Ukraine's access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine's military aims (defending itself [...]

On Wednesday, JD Vance did the one thing JD Vance knows how to do with full commitment: lie through his teeth about something he fully knows is bullshit. In this case, claiming that Donald Trump hates the idea of people enriching themselves fraudulently over access to the government." Remember, this is the same Donald Trump [...]

It's time you get up to speed with Ruby on Rails! This full-stack web framework is all about letting you build applications quickly. Its elegance, flexibility, and speed make Ruby on Rails a popular choice for businesses, so taking the time to master it can pay huge dividends down the road. In this course, you'll [...]

Not that we really needed any more evidence of bad faith by ICE and the officer who decided to drive his car across a city street and into an adjacent parking lot for the apparent sole purpose of running over a fleeing migrant, but here it is anyway. As we covered last week, ICE officers [...]

Brendan Carr is a silly, hypocritical fascist who splits his time between destroying U.S. consumer protection standards and media consolidation limits, and abusing his position as FCC boss to threaten broadcast networks for airing stuff like comedy. Or journalism. Or politicians that the increasingly-unpopular President is clearly afraid of. Lately Trump has been complaining about [...]

Alright, I don't quite know what to make of what Epic Games is doing with this AI-driven nonsense, but it's not great. I've spent a bit of time trying to argue that new AI technology has some place in this industry, but Epic and its leadership appears to be trying to personify every last thing [...]

A quick update on a story we mentioned earlier this month. Much of the attention in the whole Bricks & Minifigs saga has focused on Reckless Ben and his attempts to expose sketchy behavior by the company, but the fight has also put a lot more scrutiny on Bricks & Minifigs Corporate (BAM), including the [...]

Sam Altman is not punk. He's no revolutionary. Jensen Huang wears a black leather jacket, the uniform of Brando and the Ramones, but that doesn't make him a rebel. The scientists and engineers we might have looked to as the new hackers are well on their way to becoming among the richest people in history. [...]

For the past several months, the DHS and DOJ have been pushing hard to make Trump's illegal voter election conspiracy theories a reality. Trump continues to claim millions of non-citizen voters are participating in federal elections - something he persists in proclaiming despite having won two of the last three presidential races. This isn't really [...]

CyberTraining 365 is the best training destination for you and your team. Here you can Master Cyber Security techniques such as Analyzing Malware, Penetration Testing, Advanced Persistent Threats, Threat Intelligence Research, Reverse Engineering, and much more. This online academy offers 3,877 up-to-date modules on all the latest technologies and industry standards. These courses are aligned [...]

A few weeks ago we wrote about how the lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft in the massive multi-district litigation (MDL) against the companies over how they trained their AI had called for the exclusion of an expert witness report after it was revealed that lawyers for the plaintiffs had apparently surreptitiously paid for the report, [...]

You may have noticed that under corrupt Trumpist courts, if a regulator like the FCC engages in literally anything that threatens corporate power or aids workers, competition, or consumers (say, net neutrality, for example), or even school kids, it's clearly illegal and a dramatic overreach of regulatory power. If an agency does things like launch [...]

Court reform cannot come soon enough, because unless and until it does we cannot count on the Supreme Court to dispense justice. For many reasons, but this week brought the focus to one in particular, one we've long known was a problem, because we've seen it be once before: the Court fails to take up [...]

Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for free expression. And it keeps improving. As the saying goes, it's the worst it will ever be. People use it to receive ever-smarter speech and to create ever-better speech of their own. AI is now an important part of the marketplace of ideas-a market that, in America, is [...]

It's never a good idea to just print whatever the government tells you to print, not when you have the First Amendment to rely on. On the other hand, if you're CBS News, it's probably in your best interest to run whatever the government says to run because it's probably going to be the same [...]

This past weekend was the latest in an ongoing series of (massive) No Kings" protests held around the country (and in some cases around the globe). The latest one was part of a get out the (early) vote" campaign to make sure people are voting in the upcoming midterm elections. And, in the middle of [...]

We'd all like to learn something new, but long courses or heavy reading can feel too time consuming. Nibble transforms your screen time into short, interactive learning experiences designed to fit your daily routine. With bite sized lessons, quizzes, audio, and games, you can explore knowledge in a way that feels simple and engaging. Whether [...]

At best, most Trump administration officials can be called sycophants." At BEST. But so many of them can be called a lot of other things a bit more insulting. We have a lot of shoe options to work with. Most of them fit multiple people. Rubes, hucksters, useful idiots, bigots, charlatans, window lickers, narcissists, anthropomorphic [...]

I've documented for years how major media consolidation is simultaneously completely pointless and incredibly harmful. Such deals exist exclusively so that unremarkable rich men with no real ideas can grab some tax breaks, create the illusion of perpetual growth, and pretend they're savvy dealmakers." Yet every single time a major media merger is completed the [...]

The Stop Killing Games movement appears to still be alive and well. The grassroots campaign to legislate out the practice of gaming companies selling games that they neuter or render unplayable in whole or part later when shutting down backend server support has had its ups and downs, to be sure. An effort to pass [...]

The Metric Is Not the Missionis a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy-from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around [...]

Last year, Sling TV unveiled a rare bit of innovation in an increasingly enshittified streaming video market. They began offering what they called mini-subscriptions," allowing users to subscribe to live streaming TV for the day, weekend, or a full week for prices starting at around $5. It was a nice option for folks who don't [...]

We've been covering a bunch of stories related to the saga of Reckless" Ben Schneider and Bricks & Minifigs (BAM"), which began with a series of videos Schneider produced about his increasingly more extreme attempts to get back the Lego sets that someone had given to a BAM franchise on a consignment deal, and which [...]

The Soundfreaq Sound Spot II combines wireless audio performance, ambient lighting, and relaxing sound features in a compact design built for modern lifestyles. Featuring a Bamboo and White finish with eco-friendly materials, this Bluetooth speaker complements bedrooms, offices, living rooms, and personal spaces while delivering both style and functionality. Engineered with a custom-designed audio driver, [...]

If most cops had a sense of irony, they wouldn't be cops. By that I mean that there's little in the job that attracts people with tons of self-awareness or a finely developed sense of humor. Both of those traits generally contain a sense of irony. And since most cops don't have that, this is [...]

Shane Mac, a tech entrepreneur and CEO of the software developer XMTP Labs, decided to connect Grok Bot to his personal bank account. Like many people who attach undercooked big tech agentic AI agents to their personal accounts without reading the instructions (see: Muse's rough last few weeks), it didn't go well. Mac soon found [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is n00bdragon with a comment about Florida's age-gating law and its esoteric definition of addiction: Is anyone else bothered by this incredibly strange definition of addiction"? Is YMCA soccer addicting if 10% of a youth soccer team (one player) plays soccer for more than two [...]

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Back in the much simpler times of 2021, we wrote about some of the games Major League Baseball decided to play as part of a brief owner's lockout of players while both sides negotiated a collective bargaining agreement. This included essentially scrubbing the MLB website of all pictures of current players, stories about current players, [...]

Back in the early days of the Internet - 1988 to be precise - the self-replicating computer program known as the Morris worm spread across the network and shut down thousands of online VAX and Sun computers. It was a good example of software not going rogue, but doing exactly what its creator had intended [...]

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 [...]

For years, the idea of expanding the Supreme Court has been dismissed as a fantasy among serious" thinkers. However, with it becoming ever more clear that the Supreme Court has gone completely off the rails and is now a purely partisan entity, rather than one doing neutral adjudications, more people are open to the idea [...]

The Ultimate Web Coding for Everyone Bundle has 8 introductory courses covering core programming languages and web development frameworks. You'll learn about Python, Ruby, JavaScript, MySQL, and more. It's on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. [...]

There's been plenty of talk by judges about imposing sanctions on ICE and DOJ lawyers who have routinely violated court orders and constitutional rights, and straight up lied in court (or allowed agents and officers to lie in court). But not much has actually been done about this. So far, it's mostly been threats of [...]

Our consolidated corporate press doesn't really make this clear, surprisingly, but the United States is too corrupt to function. There's simply no shortage of evidence across every arena that matters. Trump's corruption is utterly historic, yet it's just endlessly normalized. To the point where most press outlets don't really even mention Trump's corruption clearly when [...]

We just talked about how the majority of the American public either believes that RFK Jr. recommends they not get the MMR vaccine that protects people from measles, or are otherwise unsure of what his stance even is on the topic. When Kennedy sycophants (sickophants?) attempt to point at all the times Kennedy has said [...]

The Metric Is Not the Missionis a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy-from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around [...]

Law enforcement agencies across the country are increasingly relying on spying technologies-automated license plate readers(ALPR),cell-site simulators, andfacial recognition, to name a few-causing an outcry in many communities where people are rightly concerned about the threat to civil rights and civil liberties these tools present. Some authorities are responding to these concerns by trying to hide [...]

Dive into Godot - a rising star in the game engine world - with the 2026 Complete Godot Stack Development Bundle. You'll learn to create platformers, RPGs, strategy games, FPS games, and more as you master this free and open-source engine with easily expandable systems. Plus, you'll also explore techniques for game design and game [...]

This is now as common as breathing. ICE does stuff. Arrested people invoke their rights. ICE shows up in court. The court expresses its anger at ICE's tactics and lies. Thousands of habeas cases filed by migrants have ended with the courts siding with the arrested migrants. It's actually more than 10,000 at this point, [...]

Apparently we're in an era where the courts just decide to ignore precedents they don't like. And that leads us to ridiculous results like yesterday's ruling in the Eleventh Circuit allowing Florida's HB3 social media age verification law to move forward. But to understand how messed up it is, you need to know the history [...]

One of the ways Musk fraudulently goosed SpaceX stock value during the IPO was by pretending that the company would very quickly (in just a year or two) grow from just 12 million global Starlink subscribers (just 4 million in the States) to something more akin to 300-500 million. The way Starlink claims they'll do [...]

There have certainly been some bad takes on both sides of the AI in video games argument. In one corner, we have the never-AI-ers who reflexively claim that any use of any type of AI in any game is a total disqualifier. No quarter is given to nuance. No daylight is offered for discussion. It [...]

A key role universities play in society is providing knowledge that can guide public action. Moreover, public universities have a legal duty to serve the public. We expect researchers in universities to produce and disseminate knowledge that can ultimately advance human flourishing and meet the informational needs of lawmakers, civil society, and the public generally. [...]

This is not a unique or new observation, but so many MAGA attacks on others are projection, claiming that Democrats were doing the very things that MAGA always knew they would do if they were in charge. We've certainly spent plenty of time talking about Donald Trump's myriad and non-stop attacks on free speech, and [...]

The Academy of Game Art Bundle teaches you the basics of how to create video game art. You'll learn how to use Inkscape to create logos, 2D backgrounds, pre-defined modules, UI designs, and characters. A course on using DragonBones will teach you how to animate your characters as well. The bundle is on sale for [...]

More evidence is piling up that contradicts the almost-but-not-quite denials given by administration officials in response to allegations about the DHS compiling a database to keep tabs on protesters. Just a few months ago, Immigration Czar" Todd Lyons was trying to turn credible accusations into a nothingburger by deploying a few vague and trite statements [...]

Remember how the Trump administration - and folks like Brendan Carr - spent four straight years fear-mongering about China's purported control over TikTok and its owner, ByteDance? And remember how the Trump administration (with incompetent Democratic lawmaker help) fixed" the problem by offloading Tiktok to Trump's billionaire buddies while still maintaining co-ownership with the Chinese? [...]

The apocryphal quote supposedly from Mark Twain is one of my favorites: History does not repeat, but it does often rhyme." Now, there is no evidence that Twain ever actually authored these words, but it's incredible how true they tend to be regardless. And when it comes to the current measles outbreak that is ravaging [...]