Techdirt

In his latest drain the swamp" move that will actually flood the entire ecosystem, Trump demanded the Democratic members of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) resign immediately. This may sound like just more petty partisan BS, but it could have huge unintended consequences, including for Trump's own companies. Sometimes it helps to [...]

The Trump Administration is apparently going to be a law unto itself. There have been plenty of people put up against the wall in recent days, but the weekend concluded with Donald Trump - perhaps illegally - firing at least 15 Inspectors General. This mass firing leaves the Defense Department, State Department, Department of Veterans [...]

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 [...]

Disclosure:I'm onthe board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, though all of it applies equally to other decentralized social media ecosystems. The internet was supposed to liberate us. Instead, it's left us feeling helpless, waiting for billionaires, governments, and tech giants to save [...]

Late last year eight major U.S. telecoms were the victim ofa massive intrusion by Chinese hackerswho managed to spy on public U.S. officials for months. The Salt Typhoon" hack was so severe, the intruders spent much of the last year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the meteorologist who was fired for criticizing Elon Muk's nazi salute. In first place, it's Maura with a reaction to the whole ridiculous situation: I hate that Elon Musk's fans are using his autism diagnosis to excuse his behavior. [...]

Despite all that has happened (and boy does it seem like too much), the fact is we're still less than one month into 2025 - and that means there's still time to enter the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! The jam is open through January 31st, and you [...]

And now this whole thing gets even messier. What started off as something of a Streisand Effect post about Justin Baldoni's decision to amplify the accusations made against him by Blake Lively has now simply ballooned into something much, much larger. Keep in mind that Lively's accusations can essentially be distilled down to two main [...]

Numerous articles on Walled Culture have chronicled the struggles to turn the aspirations ofopen access to knowledgeinto reality. The central reason people do not have free digital access to all academic knowledge is that publishers have been successful in subverting attempts to provide it. Publishers are strongly motivated to undermine open access, since its successful [...]

The Detroit PD has made this sort of thing its unofficial brand. It has even shelled out at least $300,000 to ensure people most often think of the Detroit PD when discussing false arrests aided and abetted by facial recognition tech. But there are plenty of others in the US law enforcement industrial complex vying [...]

After King Trump's dutiful Supreme Court recently refused to hear the case, a New York State law has taken effect requiring that ISPs provide low-income, state residents affordable $15 broadband. It's a big win for digital equity activists and consumer groups that have long argued that America's heavily monopolized (and barely competitive) broadband industry results [...]

Back in November, I explained in great detail how Trump's new FCC chair Brendan Carr was signaling loud and clear that he intended to be Trump's top censor. This was in contrast to both his and Trump's declaration that Carr was some sort of free speech warrior." Instead, he has given every indication that he's [...]

Project Management is global. This is one of those professions similar to being an accountant, where your skills and talents can be applied to any industry in any place. The 10-course Complete PMP Training Bundle provides a comprehensive training path for all things project management, including the most update to date courses including PMP 6th [...]

Well, well, well: let's get this circuit split started! In completely unexpected news, the DC Court of Appeals has ruled [PDF] that compelling someone to unlock a device using their finger is a violation of Fifth Amendment protections that disallow forcing someone to testify against themselves. (h/t Gabriel Malor on Bluesky) Most courts have ruled [...]

We've talked repeatedly how one way to boost lagging U.S. broadband competition is the support of open access" fiber networks that allow numerous ISPs to compete over a centralized fiber network. In ideal implementations, like Ammon, Idaho or in parts of Utah, residents have the option of switching between multiple, competing ISPs, sometimes in a [...]

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 borrow a phrase famously used by the world class philosophers called Green Day, Elon Musk is something of a walking contradiction. He touts the so-called Twitter Files" as some kind of damning report on government weaponization against critical content and is then accused of doing exactly the same thing himself. He's a free speech [...]

For all the hype and warnings about how TikTok is clearly a national security threat" from China, the Trump administration has effectively kneecapped the investigation into one of the most serious cybersecurity breaches in US history - a genuine, proven threat to national security. In what Team Trump probably thinks is a move to destroy [...]

Despite a lot of bullshit about how Trump is super populist," supports antitrust reform," and will carry on the legacy of monopoly busters like Lina Khan," none of that has ever been true. Trump's first administration was jam packed with the rubber stamping of plenty of terrible mergers. Streaming, media, and telecom companies are very [...]

In Trumpworld, loyalty trumps all - even deeply held beliefs about crime and punishment. Shower Trump with praise and you can get away with murder (or at least drug trafficking). But dare to criticize him, and no punishment is too harsh. Making decisions based on who most inflated your ego may not seem like the [...]

The Database Administration Super Bundle has 9 courses to help you go from data novice to expert administrator. You'll discover how to build and manage databases with MySQL and MongoDB. Courses also cover Microsoft SQL Server, Informatica, Minitab, Tableau, and regression modeling. It's on sale for $60. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and [...]

The government's next-best argument (after Third Party Doctrine yo!") in support of its bulk collection of US persons' phone metadata via the (now partly-dead) Section 215 surveillance program was this: hey, it's just metadata. How harmful could it be? (And if it's of so little use to the NSA/FBI/others, how is it possible we're using [...]

It's fairly obvious that Netflix won the first round of the streaming TV wars. Here's the thing: as subscriber growth becomes saturated, Netflix has to keep providing Wall Street with those sweet, improved quarterly returns at any cost. To do that they're going to follow directly on the heels of the cable giants (like Charter [...]

Like the other major sports leagues in America, the NHL has not been immune from engaging in IP protectionism in the past. The league has been relatively touchy when it comes to local businesses simply cheering on their local hockey teams, for instance, and has also tried to keep apps that report on NHL content [...]

Love it or loathe it, there's no denying that the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most important piece of data protection law around. GDPR stories are often about big, bad companies failing to respect the legislation, but there's a small but amusing group of incidents in which the EU itself has been [...]

This is probably it for awhile. The DOJ Civil Rights Division most likely will be sidelined for at least the next four years as Trump returns to office and his not-so-latent desires to impose a police state. Notwithstanding his supporters' apparent willingness to assault officers who stand between them and a stolen" election, Trump has [...]

I'm not crazy about writing about a Supreme Court oral argument if the Court is just going to make a fool out of me by doing something they know is wrong and completely divorced from the argument they heard, which laid before them everything they needed to reach a decision that adhered to constitutional precedent. [...]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it's processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch - whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, [...]

Well, that didn't take long. A short-lived win for civil liberties and the Free Speech Coalition has been undone by the Sixth Circuit Appeals court. The reasoning behind the roll back of the injunction are questionable, to say the least. The Free Speech Coalition's case against Tennessee's age verification law was solid. Or, at least, [...]

For years many press outlets (and contrarian engagement pundits like Matt Stoller) tried to argue that the Trump GOP was now serious about antitrust reform," reining in corporate power," or holding Big Tech Accountable." The argument was that because Trumpism claims to be populist," it could be convinced to implement serious anti-corporatist antitrust reform that [...]

For those of you who are not football fans, we're coming up on Super Bowl season. And, yes, that will surely mean that we will eventually do some posting on the ridiculous way in which the NFL enforces the trademark rights it has, and indeed some it does not have, for the Super Bowl. But [...]

I know that Mark Zuckerberg no longer likes fact-checking, but it's not going to stop me from continuing to fact-check him. I'm going to rate his claimed plans of moving trust & safety and content moderation teams away from California to Texas as not just an obnoxiously stupid political suck-up, but also something that increasingly [...]

Even though the Supreme Court somehow didn't agree, the ban on TikTok remains unconstitutional garbage for all the reasons we've discussed: its impact on the platform itself, the impact on its users, and its impact on other service providers that help it work. The corrupt scramble we've seen to try to keep it going, ever [...]

One of the many new executive orders signed by PresidentDonald Trumpon Monday was the long-hyped creation of the Department of Government Efficiency(DOGE). DOGE is portrayed as a sort of government efficiency and innovation office, but it's primarily flimsy cover for the extraction class as they eliminate corporate oversight, consumer protection, labor rights, and the social [...]

This post was written on Sunday. By the time you read it there may have been 12,492 further unconstitutional TikTok-related hijinks since then, but because this particular kind of unconstitutional violation might well rear its ugly head again, if not with respect to TikTok then with respect to something else, it's still worth pointing out [...]

Whether you're a seasoned traveler, an international business professional, or simply language enthusiast, the Babbel Language Learning Deal is your passport to fluency. Covering a range of topics that are actually valuable on the road and using time-tested strategies proven by academics from Yale University, City University of New York, and Michigan State University, Babbel [...]

Disclosure: I'm on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, even though part of this is cheering on a new entrant looking to build an alternative to Bluesky. There's been some debate over the last year or so regarding Bluesky and how [...]

Last year U.S. broadband giant Verizon faced yet another class action lawsuit for sleazy, misleading fees. This latest $100 million class action alleged that Verizon for years ripped off its customers via a $3 (and up) Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge" that it tacked at the bottom of user bills to help the company falsely [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Stephen T. Stone with a comment about platforms systematically removing a user for making a deck of Most Wanted CEO playing cards: The same people who celebrate this will whine their asses off if someone gets banned from Twitter for saying a racial slur. Can't [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, an excellent piece in the New York Times looked how years of copyright maximalism were killing pop music. AG William Barr was sparring with Apple over the DOJ's ability to crack iPhones, and Devin Nunes was extending his legal threats to fellow congressional representatives. We looked at the [...]

I suppose this was probably inevitable, but boy do I wonder if it's smart. We were just talking about the celebrity drama du jour between Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds, and Justin Baldoni. The very short version of this is that Lively and Baldoni starred in a movie together, Lively sued Baldoni and made a series [...]

As the we wrote in our amicus brief (which it appears the justices did not read - guess they didn't have time...), if the TikTok ban is blessed, it provides a roadmap for how to avoid the Constitution's prohibition to make no law" abridging free expression. All the government needs to do is declare that [...]

Last year, Kashmir Hill at the New York Timespublished a major storyconfirming that automakers collect all sorts of driver behavior data then sell it to a long list of companies - without making that clear to car owners or getting consent. That includes insurance companies, which are now jacking up insurance rates if they see [...]

Italy remains pretty fucking weird when it comes to all things Italian. From top prosecutors taking aim at vendors who debase" respected Italian art by, say, offering products featuring Michelangelo's David" (mainly the naked bits, which is all of it) or fining government entities (even those engaged in promoting tourism) for using any other language [...]

It seemed pretty obvious from the way the Supreme Court's oral arguments went regarding the TikTok ban that this would be the outcome: a 9-0 per curiam decision saying eh, it's fine to ban TikTok." There is no doubt that, for more than 170 million Americans, TikTok offers a distinctive and expansive outlet for expression, [...]

Fuse Vint is a retro radio, speaker, and charger all in one! Indulge in the nostalgia of traditional radio broadcasts. Fuse Vint comes equipped with a built-in AM/FM radio tuner. Tune in to your favorite local radio stations and immerse yourself in the charm of traditional frequency-based broadcasting. It also works as a standalone speaker [...]

Remember how Zuckerberg was done with politics"? Remember how he promised that he was going to stop doing what politicians demanded he do? Now it turns out that he not only did his big set of moderation changes to please Trump, but did so only after he was told by the incoming administration to act. [...]

A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itselfon the receiving end of an antitrust lawsuitfor its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company's own repair facilities, driving up costs and [...]

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 [...]

The NHL keeps doing this kind of crap to itself. Of all the major American sports leagues, I'd say it's pretty clear that the National Hockey League trails all the others in terms of getting things right with the internet. The league finally piggybacked onto the MLB Advanced Media platform several years ago to power [...]