Techdirt

For a few years now, New Jersey cops have enjoyed additional privacy protections that aren't made available to other residents of the state. The reason is Daniel's Law." This law went into effect in 2021, placing cops, judges, and certain other government employees above the people they serve by forbidding the dissemination of their personal [...]

The following is republished from the excellent Pessimist's Archive, with permission. The Oxford Dictionary just added brainrot" as its newest official word-a cynical, but tongue-in-cheek term for consuming too much short-form social media content. However, the word isn't actually new - in the archives we found examples going back as far as a century and [...]

Kash Patel - Trump's pick to head the FBI - is not the sort of person who should be allowed to head the FBI. While he does have some experience as a federal prosecutor, he's mostly known for helping Republicans thwart the Russian election interference probe that began during Trump's first term and for filling [...]

In today's fast-paced world, staying ahead requires constant learning. Headway Premium helps you keep up with summaries of nonfiction bestsellers injust 15 minutes.This exclusive deal gives you unlimited access to Headway's massive library of1500+ book summaries, with30-50 new ones added monthly. Cover any topic you can imagine, from personal development and business strategies to health [...]

The censors are making a big push on the new version of KOSPA," which is the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) merged with a problematic privacy bill (hence the P"). Over the weekend, Senator Marsha Blackburn - who directly admitted the point of the bill was to protect minor children from the transgender [sic] in [...]

SpaceX's Starlink service can be an absolute game changer for those completely out of range of broadband access. Getting several hundred megabits per second in the middle of nowhere is adecidedly good thing, assuming you can afford the $120 a monthly subscription, $375 (or more) hardware fee, and occasional $100 congestion surcharges." But contrary to [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Thad with a comment about the news that the owner of the LA Times will be personally reviewing opinion headlines: If anybody's got some money to spare, consider donating to news sources that aren't owned by billionaires, like PBS, ProPublica, 404 Media, or, you know, [...]

We're past the halfway point of our Kickstarter campaign for One Billion Users, a new competitive card game about building the biggest and best social media network. We're very excited to get this game into people's hands, but we won't be able to do it without your support! If you want to try your hand [...]

Valve's Steam PC gaming storefront appears to be on a bit of a pro-consumer kick as of late and I like it. We recently discussed the platform's update to its purchase process, which now specifically includes explicit language around how the purchase is that of a revokable license to play the game, rather than any [...]

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 round-up of the latest news in online [...]

To anyone who listened to the oral arguments in the DC Circuit regarding the TikTok ban bill, it perhaps wasn't a huge surprise that the DC Circuit today ruled to uphold the ban, but the resulting opinion is incredibly troubling. In a stunning and dangerous decision, the court argued that banning TikTok somehow vindicates and [...]

Civil asset forfeiture has never been about dismantling criminal operations. It has always been about immediately enriching those who directly benefit from every dollar seized under the pretense that taking cash away from random people somehow cripples multi-national drug operations that have both the personnel and the cash on hand to survive these small-ish seizures. [...]

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 [...]

In a disturbing (if unsurprising) trend, Republican FCC and FTC commissioners are deliberately misusing free speech" rhetoric in an Orwellian attempt to justify government intervention to control and suppress online speech. Last week, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr pushed censorial policies in the name of free speech." This week, GOP FTC Commissioners Melissa Holyoak and Andrew [...]

We've noted for decades how the U.S. broadband sector is a mess thanks to corruption and unchecked monopoly power working tirelessly to undermine U.S. telecom competition. The result is high prices, spotty access, slow speeds, and comically terrible customer service. Another way to put it is market failure. Caused by regulatory capture. In direct response, [...]

It was only a few weeks ago that we discussed Good Old Games' (GOG) return to its roots with the site's GOG Preservation Program". While GOG never stopped selling, you know, good old games, the site also expanded over the years to be a storefront for new releases and AAA games as well. But with [...]

I've been doing this for more than 10 years and I can assure I have yet to read a DOJ civil rights investigation report that has concluded everything looks pretty OK at this cop shop. Every - and I mean every - DOJ investigation is followed by a report that can be accurately described as [...]

The Federal Trade Commission is once again taking action against a data broker for illegally collecting and selling the sensitive data of Americans, including information on people's trips to doctors offices, abortion clinics, and places of worship. This time the FTC is taking aim at Gravy Analytics and its subsidiary Venntel, which the FTC announcement [...]

Billionaire media owners are getting bolder in their attempts to suppress opinions they dislike. The latest example comes from LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who reportedly plans to personally review all opinion headlines to ensure they don't offend Elon Musk or others that Soon-Shiong is trying to impress. Considering the billionaire class keeps pretending that [...]

Microsoft 2019 Professional Plus is one of the most popular business suites globally. This new version of Office 2019 has been redesigned with more powerful features and improved cloud connectivity, allowing you to do more in less time. Office 2019 has a lot to offer in terms of features and functionality. It provides users with [...]

There's little that's more impermeable than the US border. I mean, people flow across it all the time, often without being vetted, but courts seem to agree the only thing that really matters is what border agencies are trying (and failing) to accomplish. Whatever rights need to be abridged, paused, or outright discarded are just [...]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is proposing a new rule limiting data brokers' ability to sell Americans' sensitive personal and financial information... assuming it survives the looming corruption-fueled assault on corporate oversight under the pretense of efficiency." According to an agency press release, the agency is looking to update the Fair Credit Reporting Act [...]

Cops just seem to love killing people's pets. While this act is often justified" by (often ridiculous) claims of officer safety," a whole lot of killing of people's dogs seems to happen just because law enforcement officers have the means and the opportunity to carry this act out. Nothing involving the killing of people's dogs [...]

We've talked plenty about the ways that the DMCA process specifically is wide open for fraud and abuse. There are plenty of forms this sort of thing can take, of course, but one of the more troubling among them is the use of the DMCA process specifically to disappear critical commentary that a copyright holder [...]

Support us on Patreon We've written about the many signs that Trump FCC pick Brendan Carr is eager to be America's top censor. Recently, Mike once again joined Andy Levy on The New Abnormal podcast for a discussion about how much of a threat Carr represents to free speech and the First Amendment, and you [...]

This is probably the correct conclusion to arrive at, at least at this point in extremely limited jurisprudence, but it still raises some questions courts will likely have to confront in the future. Is manhandling a phone to make it responsive to a search itself a search, or does the Fourth Amendment not kick in [...]

In May 2022 Thierry Breton, at the time a prominent European Commissioner, went to Texas and dropped in on Elon Musk, who was then on his way to buying Twitter. During his visit, Breton did something remarkable: he showed that Elon, whatever his other accomplishments, is a sucker's sucker. In a video posted on social [...]

The 2021 infrastructure bill is poised to deliver$42.5billionin broadband subsidies to the states under a program called Broadband Equity, Access, And Deployment (BEAD). This program has been slow sledding, because America's broadband maps were absolute garbage, requiring that states work overtime to fix our broadband maps and ensure the money is spent semi-wisely. Republicans and [...]

One of the most important shifts in computing over the last few decades has been the increasing use of open source software on nearly every platform, from cloud computing to smartphones (well, I would say that). For the distributed development methodology pioneered by Linus Torvalds with Linux to work, modularity is key. It allows coders [...]

This may not mean much in the grand scheme of things but it's good to see these objections on the record. It's incremental, but in these times, every increment helps, especially when the Supreme Court seems actively disinterested in discussing cases in which government officials might be found to be in the wrong. Cert has [...]

If you're not of a certain age, you may not be entirely familiar with the story of Enron, the once-vaunted energy and bandwidth trading company that went down in one of the most public bankruptcy and financial scandals of all time. It all ended in 2001, with several Enron executives being charged with accounting fraud [...]

In the only country in the world where this sort of violence happens frequently enough it's become a despairing meme, legislators continue to ignore the obvious solutions in favor of throwing money at esoteric options that won't stop Americans from entering schools to murder children en masse. In Texas, this problem hits home harder. Not [...]

Whether you're a science enthusiast, history buff, or technology geek, Curiosity Stream has something for everyone. Unleash the power of on-demand streaming that allows you to choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, and where you want to watch it. From the comfort of your living room to the remote [...]

Over the weekend, I saw Andy Baio post on Bluesky an amusing experiment in response to Mark Sample posting about how the name David Mayer" appears to break ChatGPT: The David Mayer" issue got a fair bit of attention in some corners of the media, as lots of people tried to figure out what was [...]

For decades, U.S. cable and broadband providers have statistically had some of the worst customer support and satisfaction ratings of any industry or government agency in America (see: the American Customer Satisfaction Index). That's quite a feat in a country where banks, airlines, insurance companies, and medical giants intensely compete to deliver vast untold frustration [...]

If you haven't been following along on our posts about a trademark dispute between the famed Ravinia Festival Association (RFA) and Ravinia Brewing for the last decade or so, here is a quick synopsis. The RFA operates the Ravinia Festival outdoor music venue north of Chicago. Ravinia" isn't a fanciful name, as locals here know. [...]

Yes, it's that time of year again! We're gearing up for the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! We've been running these game jams ever since 2019, when new works began entering the public domain in the US for the first time in over two decades, as a [...]

Scores of organizations from across the anti-pornography movement have filed amicus briefs supporting the state of Texas and Attorney General Ken Paxton in a U.S. Supreme Court case dealing with his state's draconian age verification law. In 2023, members of the Texas legislature adopted House Bill (HB) 1181, which explicitly singles out online adult platforms [...]

Just weeks after a court swiftly struck down California's unconstitutional deepfake" law, a similar challenge is underway in Minnesota (using the same plaintiff and same lawyers) - and the state's defense is off to an inauspicious start, with one of their own expert witnesses submitting a declaration that cites non-existent research, hallucinated" by the very [...]

Costco 1-Year Gold Star Membership Plus $45 Digital Costco Shop Card Costco is your one-stop shop for everything you want and offers a wide range of merchandise that will likely cover all of your shopping needs! With hundreds of locations across the country, Costco is the ideal place to shop without the hassle of having [...]

If you put cops in schools, this is what you get: On the morning of January 10, 2020, a parent complained to school officials about a sketch N.B. and other students had drawn in response to another student bullying N.B. The parent unreasonably insisted that school officials call the police. After arriving on school grounds, [...]

The FCC has long run an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called theUniversal Service Fund. The historically bipartisan program has long been funded by a fee on traditional phone lines. But with traditional phone lines dying, there's been a long, ongoing discussion [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment on our post about the push to post the Ten Commandments in school, in reply to a comment asking us not to insult the people asking for this: Yes, we could avoid insulting Christian nationalists who want to [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the EU was pushing back against the US on the topic of strong encryption, while Pennsylvania's Supreme Court said compelled password production violates the fifth amendment. We learned more about how freely Amazon gave cops access to Ring doorbell recordings, and about how much California was raking in [...]

As you likely know by now, we are running a Kickstarter to fund the release of One Billion Users, our new card game about building the biggest and best social media network. Earlier this week, Mike wrote about the game's roots in Touring and Mille Bornes and explained some of the new mechanics we've added, [...]

We're waiting for the lawsuit in Japan between Nintendo, The Pokemon Co., and Pocketpair, the developers of the hit game Palworld to really get going. In the meantime, the public commentary is filling the information void, including commentary from IP experts. The suit revolves around a series of patents the plaintiffs hold that cover a [...]

We've noted how Trump's win means that Brendan Carr (R, AT&T) will now be in charge of the nation's top telecom and media regulator. We've also made it very clear his tenure will involve dismantling whatever's left of FCC broadband consumer protection, killing remaining media consolidation limits, and threatening to pull the broadcast licenses of [...]

When Donald Trump announced that he was appointing current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to be the next chair of the FCC, it was no surprise. Nor was it a surprise that Trump tried to play up that Carr was a warrior for free speech." Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought [...]

ICE has never been opposed to mass surveillance. It has used everything it possibly can to locate Trump's so-called bad hombres" and subject them to family separation and a detainment infrastructure incapable of handling the former president's (and now President-elect) masturbatorial fantasies about border invasions." ICE buys location info from data brokers to evade warrant [...]

The 2024 Microsoft Essential Tools Training Bundle will help you become a Microsoft expert in no time. Courses cover Microsoft 365, Excel, Word for beginners, and Word advanced. It's on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. [...]