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For years we've talked about the serious problems of the Bayh-Dole Act, which encouraged universities to patent every damn idea that anyone associated with the university came up with in the hopes of commercializing" it. In practice this has been a total disaster. Universities locked up a ton of (often publicly funded) research behind patents" [...]

If you actually pay attention you might notice the right wing's pearl-clutching over China is neither effective nor consistent. The GOP, for years, made a giant stink about China's Huawei network gear being a massive national security threat, and pushed through legislation to tear the inexpensive gear out of U.S. networks. Then just... forgot to [...]

Police have now confirmed that Patrick White is the man who killed a police officer while going on a shooting rampage targeting the CDC campus in Atlanta, Georgia. Police have also confirmed that the motive for the attempted mass shooting was White's complaints about COVID-19 vaccines and the CDC's response to the pandemic overall. Documents [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The Trump administration has halted litigation aimed at stopping civil rights abuses of prisoners in Louisiana and mentally ill people living in South Carolina group homes. The Biden administration filed lawsuits against the two states in December after Department of Justice investigations concluded that they had [...]

Maybe this won't actually mean anything when all is said and done. Maybe what we're seeing here is the last dying breaths of a democracy as its current owners sell it off for parts and consolidate their power. But maybe it's the other thing: the checks and balances putting down as much damaging stuff on [...]

Two headlines walked into a UK courtroom: the BBC says Wikipedia loses challenge," while the Guardian says Wikipedia can challenge if the strictest rules apply." Annoyingly, both are true-and that split-screen is a perfect microcosm of what's wrong with the UK's Online Safety Act. The core issue is whether or not Wikipedia would be considered [...]

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It's no surprise that Donald Trump thinks El Salvador president Nayib Bukele is a fun hang. After all, Bukele has already referred to himself as the world's coolest dictator" - two descriptors Trump definitely aspires to. (Although he'll take the latter in the lieu of the former...) Bukele - the recent recipient of (apparently illegal) [...]

The sort of executives who fail upward into positions of prominence at major media and streaming companies are all out of original ideas. So as the Wall Street pressure for impossible, perpetual quarterly growth mounts, they've increasingly resorted to the same tactics we've long seen at major shitty cable companies like Comcast. For streaming video [...]

This past Friday, August 8th, Patrick Joseph White allegedly opened fire on the CDC campus in Atlanta, killing a police officer while expending nearly 200 shots that sprayed the office buildings. This being America, this news in and of itself is not particularly compelling. We do mass shootings and attempted mass shootings better than anyone [...]

Hysterical." Alarmist." Trump Derangement Syndrome." He'll be constrained by institutions." There are adults in the room." You're overreacting." The generals won't let him." Stop being so dramatic." Every single person who said we were being hysterical about Trump being an existential threat should be forced to explain how the Presidentseizing controlof the capital's police force [...]

Support us on Patreon One of the most troubling things about this era in American history is the number of institutions that have caved to Trump's bullying and given him what he wants, especially when it comes to media organizations. The folks over at the non-profit Free Press have done a lot of research and [...]

Amidst the current batch of child safety bills in Congress, a familiar name appears: the STOP CSAM Act. It was previously introduced in 2023, when I wrote about the threat the bill posed to the availability of strong encryption and consequently to digital privacy in the post-Roe v. Wade era. Those problems endure in the [...]

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Three weeks ago, California federal court judge Maame E. Frimpong issued an order blocking ICE from pretending looking a bit foreign was reasonably suspicious enough to justify stops, much less the mass arrests ICE officers have been carrying out regularly in the Los Angeles area. The opinion had to spell out things that should have [...]

With the cowards at CBS/Paramount havingpaid their $16 million bribe, Trump's FCC was quick to rubber-stamp its approval to the company's $8 billion merger with Skydance (owned by Trump's billionaire friends in the Ellison family). Part of that deal involves installing a Trump babysitter to ensure what's left of the media giant's journalism division is [...]

Although the Supreme Court has yet to say so itself (and probably won't any time soon, given its current composition), it's generally accepted that citizens have the right to film public officials performing their public duties. Law enforcement officers, however, seem to feel this should never be a right and that their actions in full [...]

There's a trick at the center of American political discourse-so deeply embedded that even well-meaning people don't realize they're performing it. It goes like this: if you're a fair-minded individual, you must believe that both political parties are fundamentally the same. To assert a meaningful difference in their commitment to truth, democracy, or constitutional governance [...]

This was the way it was always going to end: with Trump turning the Oval Office into the palace of a king. One need look no further than Trump's attempt to invoke the vengeful spirits of the Overlook Hotel by adding a $200 million ballroom to the White House, as though this were the early [...]

When politicians immediately blamed social media for the horrific 2022 Buffalo mass shooting-despite zero evidence linking the platforms to the attack-it was obvious deflection from actual policy failures. The scapegoating worked: survivors and victims' families sued the social media companies, and last year a confused state court wrongly ruled that Section 230 didn't protect them. [...]

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This remains one of the most unintentionally funny things the Trump administration has ever done. Of course, this regime isn't known for its sense of humor, so anything generating a laugh exists despite the regime, rather than because of it. But laugh we will! Trump is throwing billions at ICE, hoping a whole bunch of [...]

Back in June the Trump administration announced it would be launching a new mobile phone company, including a new Trump branded phone they claimed would be made in the U.S." As we noted then, it was all mostly bullshit: the venture was just a flimsy rebranding of an existing MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), which [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Arianity with a comment about how RFK Jr. approaches things: He is literally a eugenicist. If you dig down into his beliefs, he consistently thinks that if you die to something, it's because you were weak" and deserved it. In second place, it's MrWilson [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we looked at how the DHS was surveilling journalists who published leaked documents and how they obtained the encrypted messages of protestors. The FCC was trying to pretend Trump's executive order about social media wasn't ridiculous, and one commissioner who suggested it was unconstitutional was rapidly withdrawn from [...]

Disney spent 18 months negotiating to create a digital version of Dwayne Johnson for the live-action Moana film. Johnson agreed. The technology was ready. Then Disney's lawyers killed the whole thing-not because of privacy concerns or actor rights, but because they worried parts of the film might end up in the public domain. This is [...]

It's funny just how often the actions of so-called strong men" actually show just how scared and fragile they are. And if you want a more specific example of what I'm talking about, you can typically tell when a national government is feeling scared or weak, because that usually comes along with restrictions on a [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Two weeks into President Donald Trump's second presidency, and just days after he pardoned hundreds of Capitol rioters, officials Trump had placed in charge of the Justice Departmentmade a sweeping demand. They wanted the names of the thousands of FBI employees who had played a role [...]

Arrest/ticketing quotas have almost always been found illegal by courts. They used to be commonplace, but courts (at all levels) have generally ruled that quotas pervert incentives so much they encourage open, deliberate abuse of constitutional rights. Enter the Trump administration, which only considers the Second Amendment to be sacrosanct. Trump deputy Chief of Staff [...]

Equipped with a 1.2mm fine tip, the Digi Pen for iPad and Tablets provides durability, sensitivity, and pixel precision. No lagging, no skips, no scratches. Perfect for drawing, sketching, painting, and writing. With palm rejection technology, you can use it directly without wearing gloves and write on the screen as if you're writing on paper. [...]

We've talked plenty about how Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency" (DOGE) was always more about performative cruelty than actual efficiency. But a new Senate report reveals just how spectacularly DOGE failed at its supposed core mission while causing immeasurable human suffering in the process. The entire concept blew up more spectacularly than one of [...]

We've well documented how the AOL->AT&T->Warner Brothers->Discovery series of mergers were among some of the most destructive andpointless business deals" ever conceived by modern man. Just decades of savvy deal-making" that resulted in an increasingly shittier product. The mergers resulted inbottomless layoffs, the closure ofnumerousvaluable andpopular brandsand shows, and much worse product as incompetent, fail-upward [...]

For no less than 25 years now, Techdirt has been writing about how the tax preparation industry, especially Intuit, has spent gobs of money bribing lobbying government to keep relatively low-earners from simple methods for filing their tax returns. The series of posts you can find in that link, particularly those in the last 5-10 [...]

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.

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. One afternoon in mid-September, a group of middle school girls in rural East Tennessee decided to film a TikTok video while waiting to begin cheerleading practice. In the 45-second video posted later that day, one girl enters the classroom holding a cellphone. Put your hands up," [...]

We've seen some pretty ridiculous attempts by government officials to intimidate judges over the years, but the Department of Justice's new misconduct complaint against D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg might take the cake for sheer absurdity. As Steve Vladeck breaks down in exhaustive detail, the DOJ is essentially arguing that a federal judge committed misconduct" [...]

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First, the Trump administration gutted the DOJ's Civil Rights Division, probably because it was too concerned about protecting constitutional rights. Whoever still remained was allowed" to do whatever Trump's DOJ (now headed by yet another regrettable Trump pick, Pam Bondi) wanted it to do... like go to bat for the Second Amendment, which has never [...]

The Trump administration is once again warning states that they risk losing billions of dollars in historic infrastructure bill grants - if they attempt to make the taxpayer-subsidized broadband actually affordable. That's the updated guidance coming out of the Trump National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which is tasked with coordinating the looming $42.5 billion [...]

One of the more frustrating parts of the RFK Jr. experience is nailing down his views. Part of that is because he tends to keep quite vague about those views, especially when it comes to vaccines, depending on who he is talking to. When he's running an anti-vaxxer organization, his views are specific and clear. [...]

Young people should be able to access information, speak to each other and to the world, play games, and express themselves online without the government making decisions about what speech is permissible. But in one of thelatest misguided attemptsto protect children online, internet users of all ages in the UK are being forced to prove [...]

Last fall, heavily influenced by Jonathan Haidt's extremely problematic book, Australia announced that it was banning social media for everyone under the age of 16. This was already a horrifically stupid idea-the kind of policy that sounds reasonable in a tabloid headline but crumbles under any serious scrutiny. Over and over again studies have found [...]

The recently passed budget bill throws nearly $200 billion at something that doesn't actually seem to be that much of a problem: undocumented migrants. Law-abiding, hardworking taxpayers are the targets of choice for ICE, which has a 3,000-per-day arrest quota it will never meet, even though it's now spending most of its time raiding large [...]

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Just days after a jury found Tesla partially liable in a fatal Autopilot crash and ordered the company to pay over $200 million, Elon Musk took to Twitter with a bold proclamation: Teslas can drive themselves!" The timing couldn't be worse. Because thanks to a devastating article by Electrek's Fred Lambert that digs deep into [...]

The U.S. right wing has won a generational war against education and informed consensus with the closure of the Corporation For Public Broadcasting (CPB), which states it will being shuttering its doors after being unable to survive recent brutal funding cuts by Republicans. After theWhite House falsely deemed NPR and PBS a grift" last April,Republicans [...]

This whole attempted censorship of adult games on gaming platforms is becoming a thing. Collective Shout-a group out of Australia that wraps itself in a feminist flag while behaving like the religious right to get anything it doesn't like out of the video game industry-put on a pressure campaign with payment processors, writing in to [...]

As the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues apace, and MAGA grapples with the gaslit reality they live in, the Trump Administration continues to negotiate so-called trade deals, which are negotiated and implemented using pure executive fiat, under emergency powers, under an emergency declaration which has no rational basis, while everyone pretends this isn't an example of [...]

Anyone with the tiniest bit of humanity would have found a better way to mass deportations, if they even felt compelled to do it all. Under Trump, the extra layers of cruelty are an essential part of the package - something that piles the deliberate infliction of misery on top of the thick crust of [...]

Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you'll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they've built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to concentrated political power. This isn't about technology being inherently dangerous-it's about how distorted Wall Street incentives drove [...]