Techdirt

As recently noted, New York State now has a law requiring that ISPs (with more than 20,000 subscribers) offer low-income state residents a 25 Mbps broadband tier for $15. Big Telecom didn't much like that, but their efforts to kill the law, first passed in 2021, fell apart when the Supreme Court refused to hear [...]

There's a coup underway in the federal government. Across the rest of the nation, people seeking to endear themselves with President Trump or his supporters are doing the same sort of thing at the state level. Refusing to even acknowledge long-standing rights or court precedent, legislators are becoming the Project 2025 they want to see [...]

The hazard with landing upon a legal solution that seems too good to be true is that it often is. So as you read this post it is important to keep in mind that I may have overlooked something, and there can always be defenses. Few things are guaranteed in law, and even in the [...]

In George Orwell'sNineteen Eighty-Four, the ultimate act of rebellion comes when Winston Smith insists that two plus two equals four, defying a system that demands he accept whatever reality the Party declares. The Party doesn't just want him to say two plus two equals five-they want him to believe it. This demand that citizens deny [...]

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 to run numerous errands around town. AGold Star Membershipincludes a FREE [...]

When even the Wall Street Journal's reliably pro-Trump opinion page starts sounding alarm bells about the administration's policies, something significant has shifted. When even the thinkers" at the most MAGA of think tanks are calling what Elon is doing in the government a true constitutional crisis," we're beginning to see cracks in the snow globe [...]

I don't know if it's the same where you are, but all the pharmacies here in South Seattle have a decidedly... apocalyptic feel. Many shelves are empty. A lot of goods have been locked up to address a retail theft epidemic that didn't actually happen. And understaffed stores are usually overseen by one fifteen year [...]

I'll give the folks over at Good Old Games (GOG) credit: they're certainly doing what they said they were going to do. We've been talking about GOG a fair amount lately, mainly since the platform announced it was pivoting back to focus on its initial raison d'etre: bringing retro, DRM-free games back to a public [...]

After several months of pretending this sort of thing just didn't happen there, the Polish government finally admitted some of its members had abused powerful smartphone malware it had purchased from Israeli spyware firm, NSO Group. This came to light following an investigation that found someone in the government had illegally targeted a Polish government [...]

For years, we've watched self-proclaimed free speech warriors" hyperventilate about imaginary government control of social media content moderation. Mysteriously, as I pointed out last fall, these warriors developed sudden laryngitis when social media platform owners Elon Musk and Donald Trump actually took over the US government. Anyone with a functioning brain knew this would eventually [...]

A coup is underway in the United States, and we must stop pretending otherwise. The signs areunmistakable and accelerating: in just the past 48 hours, Elon Musk's DOGE commission has seized control of Treasury payment systems and gained unauthorized access to classified USAID materials, while security officials who followed protocols were removed. Career civil servants [...]

People sometimes think that cybersecurity is just about defending computer systems from remote adversaries. But it's broader than that; cybersecurity has always been about protecting computer systems more generally from any sort of misuse, no matter how the adversary might access them. So that Elon Musk and his minions have managed to walk right into [...]

Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone lifetime subscription for all languages. Trusted by top-tier organizations like NASA, Calvin Klein, and TripAdvisor, Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking [...]

Remember the Twitter Files? That carefully orchestrated expose" where incredibly gullible hand-picked journalists were given selective access to internal documents to manufacture misleading outrage about Twitter's content moderation? Get ready for the government edition. If you want to predict what's coming next in Elon Musk's governmental power grab, look no further than his Twitter takeover [...]

During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passed a law requiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn't a huge ask; it costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Trump's Department of Education rolling back anti-book-ban guidance: Remember, kids. If a government is trying this hard to ban books, you should damn well be interested in finding out what those books actually say! In second place, it's That One [...]

It's February, which means this year's edition of the public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929, has come to a close. And we got a record-breaking number of entries this time around, with 34 games submitted (edging out the previous record of 31). That means we've got a lot of work to do judging [...]

One of the more annoying ways that Sony insists on handing itself losses for no reason whatsoever has been its insistance on requiring a PlayStation Network account for cross-platform titles. The company has done this with a bunch of these titles, perhaps most famously so when it did so with Helldivers 2, an early access [...]

Remember how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by ripping apart its infrastructure without understanding it? Now imagine that same playbook applied to the federal government. It's happening, and the stakes are exponentially higher. When reviewing Kate Conger and Ryan Mac's book Character Limit" last fall, I highlighted two devastating patterns in Musk's management: his authoritarian impulse [...]

Last week Techdirt wrote about leading Chinese tech companies being hit with GDPR complaints from noyb.eu concerning the transfer of personal data from the EU to China. More recently, much of the world has been obsessed with another Chinese company, DeepSeek, which operates in the fashionable area of AI chatbots. Most of the discussions have [...]

Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times, has been promising to restore trust in media over the last few months. Instead, he has launched an escalating campaign of editorial interference that accomplishes exactly the opposite. First, he blocked the paper from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Then, he demanded to personally approve all op-ed [...]

There's a particularly insidious and cynical form of censorship gaining prominence in America: the weaponization of free speech" rhetoric, combined with abuses of the judicial system and executive power, to actually suppress speech. It's a strategy that turns the First Amendment's principles inside out, using the language of liberty to justify silencing critics and opponents. [...]

The Python and Django Web Development Bundle has 7 courses to help you learn how to build your own sites and apps. Courses cover the basics of Django and Python and then build upon those skills by having you create your own to do list app and user authentication app, and more. It's on sale [...]

There are lots of things we could be doing to limit school shootings. But none of those have been tried because most people, lobbyists, and politicians continue to believe issuing thoughts and prayers" statements while standing on children's graves is the absolute utmost they should be expected to do. Instead of common sense measures that [...]

To be clear: if there's a policy decision to be made between the consumer interest and big giant shitty telecom monopolies, the Trump FCC is going to always side with the big shitty telecom monopoly. It's why I find the Matt Stoller-type claims that Trump is a serious anti-corporatist keen on reining in corporate power" [...]

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 roundup of the latest news in online [...]

So it appears we haven't covered this up to the present, but back in 2020 Francesca Gregorini sued Apple and M. Night Shyamalan for copyright infringement. At issue was a series for Apple TV called Servant and, according to Gregorini, the manner in which the first three episodes of the show copied from Gregorini's movie, [...]

Lawmakers show no sign of slowing down with laws to limit minors' use of social media. State and federal legislation mandating that sites verify users' age and adjust their social media experiences accordingly are still popular, despite the fact that they haverepeatedlyfailedcourt challenges. As of late, policymakers have turned to a different model where parents [...]

It's not the first time. It certainly won't be the last. But every time, we're expected to hang back and assume the FBI is on the right side of history. Something the FBI has tried a couple of times previously is back in the news: the remote access of thousands of computers containing foreign spyware [...]

Transform any speech into written words with an impressive accuracy rate of up to 99% in just three simple steps using Voicetapp, an AI-driven voice to text transcription tool. Voicetapp harnesses the capabilities of a deep learning method called automatic speech recognition (ASR), backed by leading platforms like AWS and GCP. It supports over 170 [...]

In what looks increasingly like a protection racket, Meta has agreed to pay Donald Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit that multiple courts had already indicated was completely meritless. The settlement, which directs $22 million toward Trump's presidential library, comes after a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Trump reportedly told Zuckerberg this needed to be [...]

Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC's E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband [...]

While most of our conversations about Nintendo recently have focused on the somewhat bizarre patent lawsuit the company filed against Pocketpair over the hit game Palworld, traditionally our coverage of the company has focused more on the very wide net of IP bullying it engages in. This is a company absolutely notorious for behaving in [...]

As we mentioned on Saturday, this is the final week of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! The clock is ticking, and now there's just barely more than two days left to get your entries in. The jam closes at this Friday, January 31st, when the clock hits midnight Pacific Time. We're [...]

Well, we can go ahead and erase perhaps" from this not-all-that-prescient-actually-given-the-circumstances headline: DOJ Issues Perhaps The Last Law Enforcement Investigation Report We'll See For The Next Four Years It was inevitable. Trump's DOJ kicked the Civil Rights Division to the curb faster than Trump cycled through Attorneys General during his first term. Trump promised the [...]

While AI" (language learning models) certainly couldhelpjournalism, the fail upward brunchlords in charge of most modern media outlets instead see the technology as a way to cut corners, undermine labor, and badly automate low-quality, ultra-low effort, SEO-chasing clickbait. As a result we've seen an endless number of scandals where companies use LLMs to create entirely [...]

After years of Meta insisting its content moderation was essential for platform health, Zuckerberg's sudden embrace of fake free speech" is having exactly the consequences anyone paying attention would expect. Just as advertisers fled ExTwitter when Musk decided brand safety" was for wimps, Meta's advertisers are getting nervous about their own brands being associated with [...]

The Cybersecurity Projects Bundle offers a hands-on program featuring five real-world cybersecurity projects, totaling 35 tasks. Participants start with an introductory video for each project, detailing objectives and requirements, followed by task completion that mirrors real cybersecurity challenges. Support from industry professionals ensures personalized feedback and guidance. Upon completing the program, participants gain practical experience, [...]

It's amazing how many things just don't look bad until, you know, you actually look at them. I mean, we've always known civil asset forfeiture programs are hot garbage, but the government at large was never really interested in this take. Some officials and legislators may have had their suspicions, but the easiest way for [...]

The 2021 infrastructure bill earmarked $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies that will be coming to the states starting this year. But it also tasked the FCC with creating rules surrounding digital discrimination," or the practice of big telecoms refusing to evenly deploy next-generation broadband to low income and minority neighborhoods (despite receiving untold billions in [...]

Ah, Steve King. Not the famed author of horror fiction, of course. I'm talking about the former representative from Iowa who authored all kinds of political horror, instead. This fucking guy was perhaps best known for wanting a fence on our southern border to be of the electrified variety, for keeping a Confederate flag on [...]

You might remember that Sonos was the golden child of smart," internet-connected home hardware a decade or so ago. But that reputation has been steadily tarnished by a long line of bone-headed decisions, ranging from their 2020-era choice to brick still useful speakers and hardware, to their choice last year to release an app update [...]

You may recall a few years back that then Rep. Devin Nunes went on a SLAPPtastic suing spree, filing a bunch of highly questionable defamation lawsuits against a variety of people, including someone pretending to be a cow owned by Nunes. The lawsuits, generally, have not gone well. One of the dumber lawsuits was the [...]

Because we're all just riding Mr. Trump's wild ride down the greased slope towards fascism, the nation just has to keep getting worse day by day until the rot has set in permanently. Trump's first term in office unleashed a lot of latent censorial desire in like-minded Republicans, who soon started assaulting constituents' sensibilities and [...]

Charge your device or illuminate your desk with this innovative 6-in-1 Wireless Charger. It's easy to use with its touch buttons and Qi wireless charging for Qi-enabled devices. Beautifully made with a modern look, it can quickly charge your device and is touch-sensitive allowing you to show the digital clock. This charger comes with an [...]

For the past couple of years, Elon has tried all sorts of ways to publicly claim that things are going great since his purchase of Twitter, even as basically everyone knows that he's the emperor with no clothes on that one. He's been claiming that traffic and usage are at all-time" highs, despite little outside [...]

To be clear up front, AT&T is a predatory telecom monopolist. It works tirelessly to lobby (and sometimes bribe) government for favorable treatment as it works tirelessly to undermine competition and eliminate state and federal oversight. It then miraculously exploits that lack of competition and oversight in the form of shoddy, sluggish, and very expensive [...]

The facts are all up there in the headline, so let's deal with the lies first. Lots of places reported on this incident, but we'll go to the original source, WESH TV. Body cam footage recovered from Lake County (FL) Sheriff's Office deputy Tristan Macomber's body cam showed him driving southbound before hitting a stopped [...]

As you may have noticed, the tech world is full of news about TikTok, its ban, its reprieve and possible sale, and whether it represents a security threat to the US and its citizens. Of course, the question of whether TikTok is spying on its users and sending data back to China is broader than [...]

It's a grind. But it's been worth it. Last week, the court that's been handling Agron Hasbajrami's case for nearly a decade finally said what plenty of people have been saving for nearly as long: the FBI's warrantless searches of NSA collections to target US persons' communications and data violates the Constitution. Here's Andrew Crocker [...]