Techdirt

We've talked a lot about measles throughout this year, which is particularly frustrating given that America officially eliminated this disease from its endemic state back in 2000. How we got here is a very simple story: too many people refused to vaccinate themselves and/or their children, giving the virus a foothold which it had been [...]

If you've been following thewave of age-gating lawssweepingacross the countryandthe globe, you've probably noticed that lawmakers, tech companies, and advocates all seem to be using different terms for what sounds like the same thing. Age verification, age assurance, age estimation, age gating-they get thrown around interchangeably, but they technically mean different things. And those differences [...]

CNN, like most U.S. cable news networks, professes to provide users access to journalism. Instead, what you'll most consistently find is a sort of generic, ad-slathered, center-right, corporatist drivel with the rough edges (read: truth) sanded off like a Ken doll's genitals to avoid offense. View from nowhere" journalism that doesn't inform so much as [...]

Last week's dismissal of the FTC's antitrust case against Meta-combined with the earlier limited remedies in the Google search case-demonstrates something that should be obvious by now: antitrust is a pathetically weak tool for increasing competition in digital markets. This isn't an argument against competition. Competition in digital markets matters, desperately. But antitrust enforcement is [...]

Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino has already made a name for himself during Trump's second administration. He began making this name by engaging in an unapproved sweep of the area he controlled in California as Trump was still waiting to be sworn in. Then he was sent to Chicago by a vengeful Trump who wanted [...]

Dive into the world of self-driving cars, speech recognition technology, and more with the Complete Machine Learning Bundle. Over 10 courses, you will learn about pattern recognition and prediction, and how to harness the power of machine learning to take your programming to the next level. Discover quant trading, how to harness large data sets, [...]

For the last few years, Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and their allies have spent considerable energy attacking both academic researchers studying disinformation and the trust & safety teams at social media platforms working to identify and remove coordinated inauthentic behavior-particularly foreign influence operations. They've insisted that any attempt to study and limit such operations is [...]

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector isfalling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless growth for growth's sake" megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and newannoying restrictions on customers,undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David with a comment about Trump's freakout after Democrats told soldiers not to follow illegal orders: What everyone appears to overlook Trump's tantrum here clearly shows that he is perfectly aware that orders he puts out and plans to put out in future are [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we featured a guest post about the many problems with the idea of upload filters, while Poland was trying to get them excluded from the EU Copyright Directive. Twitch was continuing to trip over itself in response to its DMCA apocalypse, and we dug into just how bad [...]

I knew this was coming but this still is absolutely maddening. In all of our coverage of RFK Jr., particularly since his vile appointment and confirmation as head of Health and Human Services, it's been abundantly clear that he's an anti-vaxxer. While that may seem obvious to most of our readers, it's important to note [...]

When the Trump administration gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement access to a massive database ofinformation about Medicaid recipientsin June 2025,privacyandmedical justiceadvocates sounded the alarm. They warned that the move could trigger all kinds of public health and human rights harms. But most people likely shrugged and moved on with their day. Why is that? It's [...]

So we've noted repeatedly how there's a real push afoot to implement statewide right to repair" laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, while all fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado,California, andOregon, and [...]

The President of the United States is calling for the execution of six Democratic lawmakers-all military veterans or former intelligence officers-because they reminded US service members of their oath to the Constitution. That's not hyperbole or exaggeration. That's an actual thing that happened yesterday. Donald Trump spent hours on social media demanding that Senators Elissa [...]

Linux and UNIX operating systems have become increasingly popular in commercial computing environments. Due to their rapid growth in today's businesses, Linux/UNIX administrators have also become very much in demand. The Linux/UNIX Certification Training Bundle will help you prepare for the CompTIA Linux+ and the Novell Certified Linux Professional certification exams. The 2-course bundle is [...]

I've expended far too many words stating the obvious: the Trump administration's deportation program isn't interested in removing criminals. It's only interested in removing people who aren't white. That's why it vets visa applicants for anti-American" social media posts while throwing the immigration door wide open for any white people seeking to escape the persecution" [...]

We've noted time and time again that Trump's attack on U.S. cybersecurity defenses and oversight are utterly indistinguishable from a foreign attack. Perhaps with the exception of more lip filler, spray tans, diabetes, bogus efficiency, and fake piety. That's been particularly true for Trump's attack on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which has [...]

Ken Paxton's bullshit lawsuit against the makers of Tylenol, built on Trump and RFK Jr.'s bullshit press conference in which they pretended that science says acetaminophen causes autism, is off to a predictably bad start. I had a bit of a laugh shortly after this turd was filed, mainly because Kennedy himself came out after [...]

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.

When Homeland Security SecretaryKristi Noem compared antifato the transnational criminal group MS-13, Hamas and the Islamic State group in October 2025, she equated anonhierarchical, loosely organized movementof antifascist activists with some of the world's most violent and organized militant groups. Antifa is just as dangerous," she said. It's a sweeping claim that ignores crucial distinctions [...]

Donald Trump, who presents himself as a free speech champion, sure loves suing the media for their First Amendment-protected speech. CNN is a favorite target of his though these lawsuits don't do particularly well. Back in 2022, he sued CNN for calling Trump's lies about the results of the 2020 election The Big Lie." Two [...]

Flock Safety" may be the brand name, but this company's earliest sales successes had nothing to with safety. Its target audience was homeowners associations and people running gated communities in upscale neighborhoods. The purpose of the cameras (and, eventually, the attached license plate reader tech) was to make sure people who were plenty safe already [...]

StackSkills is the premier online learning platform for mastering today's most in-demand skills. Now, with this exclusive limited-time offer, you'll gain access to 1000+ StackSkills courses for life. Whether you're looking to earn a promotion, make a career change, or pick up a side hustle to make some extra cash, StackSkills delivers engaging online courses [...]

Donald Trump's FCC boss Brendan Carr is opening a fake new investigation" into PBS, NPR, and BBC in the hopes of suppressing journalistic criticism of the country's increasingly unmoored and unpopular President. Carr first leaked word of the fake investigation to right wing propaganda website Breitbart. In a letter to all three outlets (pages 1, [...]

After four years of hyperventilation about TikTok's impact on privacy, propaganda, and national security, and a year after the app was to be banned from app stores via an act of Congress, TikTok remains widely available. The Trump administration insists they hashed out a deal with Bytedance to sell the app to Trump's billionaire buddies [...]

There are lots of ways things play out when it comes to fans of multiplayer video games building out their own host servers to play them. Sometimes fans set those servers up simply because they can do it better and more securely than the publisher... and then the publisher takes them down because of intellectual [...]

You've heard of New York style, Chicago deep dish, Detroit square pans. But Colorado-style pizza? Probably not. And there's a perfectly ridiculous reason why this regional style never spread beyond a handful of restaurants in the Rocky Mountains: one guy trademarked it and scared everyone else away from making it. This story comes via a [...]

When books were rare and extremely expensive, they were often chained to the bookcase to prevent people walking off with them, in what were known as chained libraries". Copyright serves a similar purpose today, even though, thanks to the miracle of perfect, zero-cost digital copies, it is possible simultaneously to take an ebook home and [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. When President Donald Trump told reporters on Sept. 5 he'd started looking at sending the National Guard to Portland, Oregon, he said it was because of something he saw on television. He said the city was being destroyed by paid agitators. What they've done to that [...]

Let's say, hypothetically, you want to gerrymander some congressional districts to help your party win more seats. Here are a couple of options: Which do you choose? If you said obviously option 1," congratulations, you understand the law better than the Trump administration's Department of Justice. Because the Trump administration just got legally smacked down [...]

The Complete Superstar Photographer Bundle has 11 courses to help take your photography skills to the next level. Two course start you off with the basics of photography and how to take advantage of your DSLR camera. Other courses focus on lighting and posing techniques, how to photograph landscapes, food, portraits, and groups, night photography [...]

This won't matter to Donald Trump or the dozens of administration officials who live to please him. In all likelihood, it will just lead to Trump and his administration smearing one of this nation's allies for being weak on crime and too supportive of people who are being murdered by the US government. But it [...]

Last week we noted how the BBC has been tripping over itself to apologize to Donald Trump for some edits made to a BBC documentary. Admittedly the edits weren't the best idea; they effectively cobbled together two different parts of Trump's January 6 speech 54 minutes apart not to misrepresent, but to make it more [...]

It was only a few weeks ago that we wrote about a trademark dispute in the UK between a deli shop owner and a book publisher over the use of the word sabzi." Kate Attlee is the founder of Sabzi, the name of her deli, while Bloomsbury published a cookbook by Yasmin Khan called Sabzi: [...]

Amazon Ring's upcoming face recognition tool has the potential to violate the privacy rights of millions of people and could result in Amazon breaking state biometric privacy laws. Ring plans to introduce a feature to its home surveillance cameras called Familiar Faces," to identify specific people who come into view of the camera. When turned [...]

This isn't even the end of the fallout, but it's a lot of it. A small Kansas town that basically conspired to silence local journalists who were asking too many questions continues to face the consequences of its actions. That's a relief. Far too often, power gets abused and the justice system sides with the [...]

A federal judge just ruled that computer-generated summaries of novels are very likely infringing," which would effectively outlaw many book reports. That seems like a problem. The Authors Guild has one of the many lawsuits against OpenAI, and law professor Matthew Sag has the details on a ruling in that case that, if left in [...]

Not content to simply deport as many South American migrants from this country as possible, the Trump administration leaned into its lies about the latent threat to national security the mere existence of foreign people poses to national security. This administration pretends everything is a war," even as it actively avoids seeking congressional approval to [...]

MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That's all well and good, but it means nothing if you don't have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you'll [...]

Democratic Senator Mark Kelly and Republican Senator John Curtis want to gut Section 230 to combat political radicalization"-in honor of Charlie Kirk, whose entire career was built on political radicalization. Kirk styled himself as a free speech warrior" because he would show up on college campuses to debate" people, but as we've covered, the debate [...]

Donald Trump and his earlobe nibbler (FCC boss Brendan Carr) are threatening to try and censor some more comedians after their efforts to cancel Jimmy Kimmel went so well (read: not well at all). Over at the right wing white propaganda website formerly known as Twitter, Brendan Carr retweeted some whining from Donald Trump calling [...]

There is an incredible dearth of nuance when it comes to how some companies attempt to enforce their trademarks. A couple of things are true. First, an entity risks losing their marks if they don't rigorously enforce them against actual infringement. Second, the USPTO is far too lenient in granting marks that are non-creative or [...]

More than 80 law enforcement agencies across the United States have used language perpetuating harmful stereotypes against Romani people when searching the nationwide Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) network, according to audit logs obtained and analyzed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. When police run a search through the Flock Safety network, which links [...]

You know this is a spectacle, right? A show. That's what it is. A performance for social media. With blood. Pete Hegsethjust orderedthe twenty-first strike on a suspected drug boat. Three more bodies. Another video posted to X showing a vessel bursting into flames. Three male narco-terrorists" dead, the military announces. No trial. No evidence [...]

Imagine you're writing an article about a popular policy trend. The trend is expensive to implement, disruptive to normal operations, and-here's the key part-there's substantial research showing it doesn't actually work and can cause other significant problems. How would you structure that article? One approach: Lead with the evidence. Despite growing enthusiasm for [policy proposal], [...]

Well, well, well. If it isn't the system of checks and balances. We've missed you, buddy! Long story somewhat short: ICE has been terrible for years, but it's been much worse under Trump. During Trump's first regime (~2016-2020), ICE got rocked by a court decision that prevented it from engaging in traffic stops just so [...]

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

It has been frustrating, to say the least, to watch many of the big Silicon Valley tech firms bow down to Trump and do his bidding, especially when it directly contradicts things they've said and done in the past. I've tried to explain to tech company execs why this doesn't end well for them, but [...]

A coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for the elimination of a longstanding FCC rule the Trump administration abused to bully" ABC and CBS into kissing the president's ass (I'll use the term bully loosely since both companies seemed very eager to roll over for the far right wing). Last October,Trump sued CBSclaiming (falsely) [...]

This week, all our winning comments came in response to our post about Donald Trump falling for satire from a website called The Dunning-Kruger Times. In first place on the insightful side, it's That One Guy with a comment about how this is hardly surprising: He fell for it because he WANTS to believe it(and [...]