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Terumo Cardiovascular, a company that makes six-figure medical equipment used in heart surgeries, is apparently keen on attracting the ire of the right to repair" movement. But given the Trump administration's assault on state and federal consumer protection, it's not clear they'll face many meaningful repercussions for it. In a letter obtained by 404 Media, [...]

Billionaires are already deleting parts of our government, as well as various safety mechanisms on the internet that sought to minimize hate and abuse. Do we also want them to be able to rewrite our understanding of the First Amendment? Steve Wynn's latest Supreme Court petition represents a dangerous escalation in the ongoing assault on [...]

Late last fall, a number of Norfolk, Virginia residents - with the assistance of the Institute for Justice (IJ) - sued the city for blanketing Norfolk with nearly 200 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) provided by Flock Safety. Flock Safety made its first inroads with the private market, selling plate readers to gated communities and [...]

Another day, another computer system for DOGE to unlawfully access. This time it is the one running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the latest to be unlawfully shut down. Bloomberg is reporting that this time the DOGE bros incursion into the systems came with some sort of MOU, which did a few things [...]

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It turns out that when you let the world's richest man take over significant portions of the federal government, some people might get nervous. Who knew? Last week we wrote about how some staunch conservatives were finally admitting that Elon's takeover of the government represented a constitutional crisis. Then earlier this week, we showed how [...]

We'velong notedhow absurd it is that scammers, debt collectors, and greedy telemarketers have ruined our voice communications networks. We've somehow just normalized it. We've also noted how a big reason our robocall problem never gets fixed is because Congress and regulators routinely fixate on scammers and not on the legit" companies like debt collectors thatuse [...]

Techdirt has been writing about India's huge Aadhaar database of biometrics, which assigns a unique 12-digit number to all Indian citizens, for a decade now. The system was introduced to make it easier for people in India to access key government services by authenticating their identity, but there were soon plans to allow businesses to [...]

Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you." Thesewordsmarked a cultural moment-one that captured our collective anxiety about reality itself.The Matrixwasn't just a movie about robots and kung fu. It was a story about questioning the systems of power and control that shape our understanding of the world. Thered pillbecame a powerful metaphor for choosing difficult [...]

If cops aren't going to follow the law or the Constitution, I don't know why we're expecting them to adhere to end user agreements. It's not just the fake social media profiles officers and investigators use. It's also the tech they deploy. No matter how well facial recognition tech may perform, it's still problematic. And [...]

There have been legitimate debates about whether the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act - which makes it a criminal act for US entities to bribe foreign government officials - sometimes creates gray areas in international business. For example, over a decade ago, the Walmart Mexico case highlighted how Walmart payments to speed up" permitting to build [...]

As if things weren't terrible enough, the techbros of the world have decided the one-two punch of Donald Trump and Elon Musk will make them even richer than they already are, even if it means making the world a worse place to live... or suddenly die. Palantir has been on the leading edge of surveillance [...]

Six Sigma is a detail-orientated crafted set of tools and techniques that help improve processes within an organization. The main goal of the Six Sigma certification is simple: to equip individuals with the skills to recognize errors in a business process and remove them. You will receive an introduction to the tools and methods that [...]

Before the election, Elon Musk declared: I think that the strong bias with respect to government information should be to make it available to the public. Let's be as transparent as possible. Fully transparent." When one of his fanboys tweeted that quote, Elon responded by making an even bigger claim, saying: There should be no [...]

Last year Mozilla released a report showcasing how the auto industry hassome of the worst privacy practicesof any tech industry in America (no small feat). Massive amounts of driver behavior is collected by your car, and even more is hoovered up from your smartphone every time you connect. This data isn't secured, often isn't encrypted, [...]

While we all know the Thin Blue Line" flag is just a bastardization meant to signify cops are above the law, there's no constitutional way we can forbid cops from displaying their deliberate antagonism against their obligations to the people they serve: things like transparency, accountability, and the service and protection so many law enforcement [...]

I'm quite certain that by now, a few weeks into the second Trump term, many or most of our readers are already tired of the coverage over the administration's actions. And if that's you, your quarrel is not with us. It's with the administration and its plainly stated strategy of flooding the zone with shit" [...]

I've long maintained the certitude that anti-pornography campaigners aligned with the far-right and conservative Christian movements are directly or indirectly transphobic and anti-LGBTQ. A body of evidence in my own reportingand experiencescovering the rights of sex workers and the online pornography businesshas built out this schema of anti-LGBTQ and anti-pornography campaigners being tied at the [...]

The collapse of our democratic institutions isn't unstoppable. Saving them requires understanding what we're fighting for-and how human freedom actually works in our technological age. Truth isn't complicated. It lives in simple principles we all understand: People deserve a voice in decisions that shape their lives. Our ability to think and choose depends on accurate [...]

Last week, we highlighted how the richest person on the planet - Elon Musk, who currently appears to have unparalleled, Constitutionally-violating control over the US government - was running around repeating every confused 4chan dipshit's conspiracy theory about USAID, all of which were easily debunked if you... understood how reality worked. Now it turns out [...]

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Early Saturday morning a judge imposed an emergency temporary restraining order in response to the State of New York v. Trump litigation. This particular lawsuit was brought by several (blue) state attorney generals against Trump, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, and the Treasury department itself. The order, in short, tells DOGE to get out [...]

A stunning 54% of Americans now believe we're in a Constitutional crisis, according to recent YouGov polling. They're right. As a tech billionaire effectively dismantles federal agencies without Congressional authority - agencies that Congress explicitly created and funded - we're watching in real-time as our system of checks and balances crumbles. Yet supporters of the [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about the assault on the idea that laws have any meaning at all: A lot of people-especially in right-wing circles-tend to forget that the process of civilization is the process of everyone forgetting that they can grab a [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Facebook paid out a hefty settlement in a facial recognition lawsuit in Illinois, which looked like bad news for the also-just-sued new kid on the block: Clearview AI, about whom we were learning lots of disturbing new things. In an ongoing attempt to avoid its own similar problems, [...]

Last June, Louisiana became the third state to decide the US Constitution was subservient to cops' wishes that they not be filmed while performing their public duties. Arizona had already tried this twice, starting at 25 feet before trimming the halo" to an 8-foot diameter. It didn't matter. A federal court permanently blocked the law [...]

And there you have it. It was a mere couple of weeks back that I wrote about the Kansas City Chiefs potential to reach the Super Bowl and go for a third straight title and how that would mean you'd start hearing a whole lot about Pat Riley. I don't want to say I told [...]

A little over a year ago, Maine residents voted overwhelmingly (83 percent) topass a new state right to repair lawdesigned to make auto repairs easier and more affordable. More specifically, the law requires that automakers standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical datato consumers and third-party independent repair shops. [...]

In a stunning escalation that confirms our worst fears, the UK government has finally shown its true hand on encryption - and it's even worse than we predicted. According to a bombshell report from Joseph Menn at the Washington Post, British officials have ordered Apple to create a backdoor that would allow them to access [...]

After years of screaming save the children" while baselessly accusing others of exploiting kids, the Trump administration is now trying to destroy the actual infrastructure that saves children. This one crosses from standard MAGA hypocrisy into genuinely evil territory. I'm one of those people who doesn't think you can (or should) call most people inherently [...]

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Marine vet Stephen Lara's lawsuit against the Nevada Highway Patrol (NHP) and forfeiture abuse in general in that state has paid off. Not just for Lara, whose $86,900 was returned to him shortly after he filed this lawsuit, but for all residents of the state, who are now less likely to see cops walk off [...]

For a long while there it was good to be a lumbering U.S. cable monopoly. Companies like Comcast and Charter pretty much enjoyed a monopoly on broadband at next generation" speeds (over 100 Mbps) in most towns. So while they were losing traditional cable TV customers to streaming (or piracy), they could still extract their [...]

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 [...]

Sycophants do sycophantic things, that much is known. But the level to which newly-minted FCC chairman Brendan Carr has voluntarily debased himself purely to achieve his current station is extraordinary. We knew during the campaign season that Carr was eager to be America's chief censor of any content the Dear Leader disliked. That the same [...]

News moves fast... While this post was getting finalized came news that Marko Elez has resigned after his racist tweets were found and publicized. Nevertheless, the point made herein still stands. Amidst all the news today is news suggesting that Musk and his lackeys have had their access to the federal government's payment systems limited. [...]

A mirror returns exactly what stands before it. No amount of wealth can bribe it, no volume of threats can intimidate it, no technological innovation can reprogram it. A billionaire's reflection shows the same unaltered truth as a beggar's. This fundamental democracy of reflection-this absolute fidelity to physical reality-makes mirrors uniquely immune to power. They [...]

In 1872 California enacted a law declaring that every one who offers to the public to carry persons, property, or messages, excepting only telegraphic messages, is a common carrier of whatever he thus offers to carry." In 2022 the Republican National Committee sued Google, alleging that, by shunting GOP fundraising emails into Gmail spam folders, [...]

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Remember when Donald Trump and the MAGA universe wanted to lock her up!" over Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server for State Department business? Let's be clear, we found Clinton's use of a personal email server, which she claimed to have used for convenience", deeply problematic but pretty clearly not criminal. And, as [...]

It's understandably not going to get the same attention as the dismantling of numerous government agencies at the hands of rich unelected manbabies, but the Trump administration is also taking aim at all the promising parts of the 2021 infrastructure bill. Especially as it relates to broadband. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) contained [...]

It's very rare to see a cop charged with any crime in a shooting, much less charged with murder. It's even rarer to see a cop convicted. It's been happening a bit more recently, but that may just be recency bias now that more of the country is actively involved in combating police violence. In [...]

It has long been clear that the GOP, as it is today, has a death wish for our Constitutional order, but that's a subject for another post. What's more relevant is that, at this point, one could easily construe that Democrats would like our Constitution to die too. In part because of how enfeebled they [...]

It's 2025 and we're still stuck with legislators who wish it was still 1725. Or possibly any year with B.C appended. Clearly unconstitutional laws are being crafted with alarming frequency these days. Those that aren't trying to legislate morality or criminalize sexual preferences are trying to infuse government entities with state-approved religion. A lot of [...]

Back in 2022, former New York Times reporter Ben Smith and friends launched a new media company namedSemaforon the back of$25 million in donations. You might recall that one of the organization's launch events didn't go particularly well: a trust in news" event that somehow didn't see the problem with platforming and amplifyingmillionaire propagandist Tucker [...]

Just months after we learned Chinese hackers had compromised US telecom systems through government-mandated backdoors, an inexperienced developer from Musk's DOGE unit is pushing untested code directly into the Treasury's payment infrastructure - a system that handles over $6 trillion in federal payments annually. It seems reasonable to call it one of the most dangerous [...]

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There are twenty-four hours in a day. This isn't a matter of political opinion or technological disruption-it's as immutable as the fact that two plus two equals four. No amount of genius, innovation, or reality distortion can create a twenty-fifth hour. This basic truth, so obvious it seems almost foolish to state, exposes something profound [...]

SpaceX's Starlink service can be a big improvement for those completely out of range of broadband access. But contrary to what many Republicans andc-tier comedians turned conspiracy podcasters imply, Starlink isnot magic. And it comes with a growing list of caveats. Including the increasingly unhinged behavior and far right political alliances of its conspiratorial CEO. [...]

At this point, we have built up enough stories on bad YouTube takedowns to fill up a small library. Because of a combination of automated systems that are spectacularly imperfect, the desire by some bad actors to abuse and commit fraud using the notice and takedown system, and a general deference towards the alleged copyright [...]