Techdirt

When Andrew Ferguson made his pitch to Donald Trump to take over the organization, his one-page pick me" plea talked about ending" former FTC Chair Lina Khan's politically motivated investigations." We pointed out at the time how hilarious it was that he then made it clear he fully intended to abuse the power of the [...]

Embedded systems are at the heart of modern innovation, powering everything from smart devices to automotive technology. This Embedded Systems Engineer Mastery Bundle has 10 courses to help equip you with the skills to design, program, and implement microcontroller-based solutions. Gain hands-on experience with Arduino, PIC, and ESP32, master C programming for embedded applications, and [...]

While Donald Trump was trying (and failing) to cheer himself up with a self-congratulatory birthday parade - I mean, just look at this sad boy: - the Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles Sheriffs Department were busy turning peaceful protests in violent protests. Throughout the nation, millions gathered peacefully to protest Trump's military parade. [...]

Back in 2019, the Trump DOJ and FCC cobbled together a dumb planto try and hide the problems created by their rubber stamping of the competition-eroding T-Mobile and Sprint merger: they'd pretend they were helping satellite TV company Dish Network create a new 5G wireless network out ofvibes and twine. As wenoted back in 2019, [...]

This week, our winners on the insightful side are a comment-and-reply combo regarding Trump ordering the National Guard into California. In first place, it's huskcummerbund with a question: Hey, remember when Kristi Neom tweeted If Joe Biden federalizes the National Guard, that would be a direct attack on states' rights. Over the last several years, [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, Don Henley was using TikTok as a reason to push for stronger copyright laws, while some Senators were asking the FCC to reinterpret Section 230 in a ridiculous manner, and Ron Wyden was explaining how Trump and many others were totally wrong about 230. Meanwhile, we continued to [...]

One of the legitimate criticisms of large language models, generative AI, and chatbots is that they produce hallucinations -- output that is plausible but wrong. That's a problem in all domains, but arguably it's a particularly serious one in the field of law. Hallucinated citations undermine the entire edifice of common law, which is based [...]

You might recall how the Warner Brothers Discovery merger promised everyone amazing new synergies for the media sector. Instead it wound up being a giant sloppy turd of a deal resulting in endless layoffs, the shuttering of numerous popular media brands, the cancellation of a long line of popular programming, higher consumer prices, and lower [...]

Each day adds another layer of fucked-upness to this country's anti-immigration efforts. We, as a nation, are now involved daily in extrajudicial renditioning of migrants to countries they've never lived in. We're all implicated in nearly daily rejections of court orders and any remaining shred of human decency. We're treating human beings like trash to [...]

Mere days ago, and only a few weeks out from a meeting in Atlanta to discuss immunization policy and vaccination recommendations, we talked about the batshit move by RFK Jr. to fully wipe out and fire the entirety of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), an immunization advisory panel. All 17 members of [...]

It would be too kind to say the irony is lost on Republican lawmakers. They would have to be capable of comprehending and acknowledging their own hypocrisy to even begin to recognize the irony. That's why these lawmakers are so unconcerned with the long-term destruction they're causing. It's all worth it if it results in [...]

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 [...]

When a federal judge grants a temporary restraining order within hours of a hearing and writes 36 pages explaining why the President of the United States is acting illegally and unconstitutionally, you know something significant just happened. Federal Judge Charles Breyer did exactly that last night, blocking Donald Trump's deployment of the National Guard to [...]

Ah, the daily joys of living in a country that's literally too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet-era. Meta has once again been busted playing fast and loose with consumer privacy. Security researchers last week discovered that Meta and Russia's Yandex have been embedding tracking code into millions of websites [...]

Editor's Note: As I was getting this article ready to publish, a judge granted California a Temporary Restraining Order against the deployment of the National Guard. We'll have a separate write up of that later. When the Secretary of Homeland Security announces that federal forces will remain in an American city until they liberate" it [...]

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 [...]

As you'll likely recall, in late 2023, Elon Musk told advertisers to go fuck yourself" and don't advertise" in response to a question about advertisers feeling uncomfortable placing their brands next to the kind of content that Musk was promoting via the ExTwitter algorithm. But the full context of the quote is interesting in retrospect: [...]

Palantir has never had a great reputation. Even before it teamed up with Trump to create a massive, abusable database of American residents' information, it was working with forward-looking cop shops, that wanted similar massive, abusable databases of their own, even if those were limited to surveilling people in their own jurisdictions. The company is [...]

Today we need to examine something that reveals the machinery of authoritarian propaganda with surgical precision: how a handful of violent incidents across a few city blocks in Los Angeles was transformed into a crisis" justifying the deployment of federal troops against American citizens. And how easily that transformation succeeded. I write this from Los [...]

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We've written a few times about the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student who was one of the first people detained by ICE and told he was being kicked out of the country solely because Marco Rubio said he doesn't belong here. No due process. No hearing. Just Rubio's arbitrary say-so. A [...]

We've noted many times that there are two major reasons the U.S. doesn't have a functional privacy law for the modern internet era. One, we're too corrupt and greedy to do the right thing, causing us to prioritize making money over literally everything else - including public safety. And two, the government long ago realized [...]

While the Justin Baldoni legal fight with Blake Lively is still going on, one half of the dispute has been thrown in the dumpster... for now. If you're not up on the case, here is the TL;DR version. Baldoni and Lively costarred in the movie It Ends With Us. Lively filed a claim of workplace [...]

I already wrote about the GOP's bloodthirsty desire to use the military on Americans. They manufactured a nonsense crisis" by over-aggressively sending in ICE agents to grab people off the streets, leading to protests, which were focused on provoking protestors into violence, which would then be used to justify an even more violent crackdown. Given [...]

The Trump administration on June 4, 2025,announced travel restrictionstargeting 19 countries in Africa and Asia, including many of the world's poorest nations. All travel is banned from 12 of these countries, with partial restrictions on travel from the rest. The presidential proclamation, entitled Restricting the Entry of Foreign Nationals to Protect the United States from [...]

On the latest episode of the always excellent The Bugle" podcast, comedian Alice Fraser amusingly describes the horror of what's happening in Los Angeles the following way: So let's just clarify: this is arguably unlawful deployment of military force to enforce peace on peaceful protests over illegal arrests of illegal immigrants. Here's what actually happening [...]

The Academy of Educational Engineering is a premier platform tailored for aspiring and professional geeks. This all-in-one educational ecosystem is designed to empower you with expert-level knowledge and hands-on experience across embedded systems, electronics, IoT, and software development. As a premium member, you'll access comprehensive tools, engaging projects, personalized feedback, and direct mentorship, helping you [...]

We're just supposed to assume that the masked person brandishing a gun and ordering us to get into an unmarked vehicle is a federal agent, rather than a criminal. We're just supposed to buy into this new, hideous version of immigration enforcement that utilizes military gear, long guns, and a complete lack of identification as [...]

After spending election season whining that the program was taking too long, Republicans have been introducing massive new changes to a $42.5 billion infrastructure bill broadband grant program (BEAD) that not only don't serve the public interest, but could also introduce years of potential new delays. Their changes are twofold: one, they want to strip [...]

As RFK Jr. has presided over the decimation of the Health & Human Services department he runs, along with HHS' child agencies, his anti-vaxxer stance has shown through. And, really, his appointment, confirmation, and subsequent actions should fully put to bed any question of the utility of congressional approval of cabinet positions. During those hearings, [...]

U.S. consumer protection (or what's left of it after several devastating Supreme Court rulings and Trump executive orders) is on life support. But one bright spot continues to be the right to repair" movement, which is working to fight repair monopolies and make it cheaper and easier to repair the tech you own. Washington state [...]

Support us on Patreon Way, way back during the SOPA/PIPA fight, a very important part of the resistance against the bills was coming from infrastructure operators who explained how they were technically incoherent and dangerous. One prominent group was the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, co-founded by Christian Dawson. Today, with legislative amnesia setting in and new [...]

Appeasing bullies never works. Not only does it reveal your willingness to abandon principles, but bullies will never be satisfied - they'll always demand more. Columbia University is learning this lesson the hard way. The school quickly caved to Trump's demands to crack down on pro-Palestinian protests and discipline faculty. Meanwhile, Harvard stood up and [...]

The only laws the Trump Administration respects are the laws it gets to inflict on others. The rule of law, however, doesn't mean the laws don't apply to those who make the rules. And yet, here we are, seeing another flagrant refusal to comply with oversight laws just because the DHS and ICE feel they [...]

The 2025 Total Microsoft SQL Server Bundle has 5 courses that let you dive into the fundamentals. You'll learn how to create and manage databases using real-world SQL queries, install and navigate SSMS, protect your data, plan for emergencies, handle failover clustering, and much more. You'll also learn Git and GitHub step-by-step-from installation to advanced [...]

We've noted how Republicans are busy screwing up the infrastructure bill's $42.5 billion BEAD broadband grant program. After performatively whining that the program wasn't moving quickly enough for their liking during the election season, the GOP announced it would be significantly slowing fund dispersal just to make life harder on poor people and to throw [...]

This weekend, Donald Trump pulled off something that's happened exactly once before in US history: federalizing a state's National Guard over the state governor's objections without invoking the Insurrection Act. And he did it to deal with what the LAPD itself described as peaceful protests that were under control." The constitutional implications here are important. [...]

How's your Monday going? Well, buckle up. The day ain't over yet. No sooner had California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the state would be suing Trump over his illegal deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles to do whatever it is they're supposed to do when deployed illegally than the Defense Department turned Pete [...]

Trump is setting the stage for martial law. Again. The reasons for his latest move are directly tied to the actions of his administration and, more specifically, the most visible arm of his anti-migrant policies. ICE has been problematic for years, but it took two non-consecutive Trump administrations to turn it into the cartoonish supervillain [...]

Last week, Republican FCC Commissioner Nathan Simington abruptly announced that he would be stepping down from the FCC. Simington gave all of two-days notice of his departure, which was odd not only because of the short notice, but because it delays Trump Republicans from getting a voting majority allowing them to actually do anything real. [...]

Remember when TikTok was supposedly an urgent national security threat that required emergency legislation? Funny how that emergency" keeps getting 75-day extensions. Trump is reportedly about to hit the snooze button on TikTok enforcement for the third time, extending a deadline that was supposedly so urgent that Congress had to rush through legislation ignoring basic [...]

The Ultimate Python Programmer and Data Bundle has 9 courses that cover a variety of data science and Python related skills and tools. Start with learning the basics and move into learning how to use Keras, PyTorch, R, and more for data analysis and visualization. There's more and it's all on sale for $40. Note: [...]

As ICE continues to engage in a mass deportation program that more closely resembles a mass kidnapping program, communities have literally taken to the streets to chase ICE and their law enforcement enablers out of town. Rolling in looking like some sort of cartel death squad just isn't intimidating enough anymore. And if you can't [...]

Despite the ongoing fake promise of populism," so far Trump 2.0 has proven to be a bonanza for telecom giants seeking to get even bigger. As usual that means higher broadband prices and shittier broadband service are just over the horizon. As a reward for promising to be more racist, Verizon recently saw its $20 [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side MrWilson with a comment about a Republican school superintendent bemoaning that parents would opt their kids out of understanding American history": Another accusation-confession. Walters has opted the state of Oklahoma out of understanding American history. In second place, it's Professor Ronny with a simple comment [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, while many in the media were hedging their bets and wringing their hands in their coverage of the rapidly escalating protests over the murder of George Floyd, I was proud that we ran an appropriately uncompromising take from our own Tim Cushing: Let The Motherfucker Burn. In a [...]

There are many stupid things about copyright law today, and one of them is how copyright law applies to characters. Because it shouldn't, at least not in the ways it does. Copyright can legitimately apply to expression, which is why it can restrict you from copying, for example, a book or movie, because those are [...]

The most telling detail in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga isn't what the DOJ is claiming - it's what a federal prosecutor refused to do. Ben Schrader, a 15-year veteran of the U.S. Attorney's Office in Nashville and chief of the criminal division, abruptly resigned rather than put his name on the indictment the Trump [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica'sCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The Trump administration knew that the vast majority of the 238 Venezuelan immigrants it sent to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador in mid-March had not been convicted of crimes in the United [...]

When you specifically ask a judge for something, get exactly what you requested, then immediately start whining about how burdensome your own suggestion is - well, that's not legal strategy. That's performance art. Worse: having a senior Justice Department official claim that the solution that the DOJ itself requested is being unfairly imposed on the [...]