Techdirt

Instead of doing things like protecting consumers or telecom and media market competition (you know, his purported job), Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent his first few months in officeabusing agency authority to threaten companies that refuse to kiss the Trump administration's ass, or harass telecom companies that aren't sexist or racist enough for [...]

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, [...]

Abrego Garcia is being held incommunicado in a foreign torture camp. As far as anyone knows, he has no idea that he is the subject of a Supreme Court ruling and a high-profile legal battle to get him home. He likely doesn't even know if his family, or anyone else, knows where he is. We [...]

So you may have noticed that the media red carpet has been rolled out for Ezra Klein's new book, Abundance." I don't think the premise of the book is particularly original or challenging: that government should promise and efficiently deliver big things that genuinely help the public. But as we noted last week, I had [...]

The EU Commission spent most of 2024 getting knocked around by opponents of its anti-encryption efforts. While it did find some support from countries with, shall we say, more authoritarian urges, most countries that still actually cared about security and privacy pushed back, resulting in the Commission putting encryption backdoors on the back burner until [...]

We predicted earlier this week that the Supreme Court would need to weigh in on the Abrego Garcia case. Now it has done so with a striking unanimous order that rejects the DOJ's attempt to wash its hands of what it admits was accidentally" trafficking Garcia to El Salvador - a country he had protected [...]

We've noted for years how the smart" TV sector is at the forefront of enshittification. It's a sector full of companies that have doubled down on annoying ads and surveillance to the detriment of the customer. And while absolutely fixated on monetizing consumer surveillance data, it routinely fails to put anywhere close to the same [...]

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 fascism apologist 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, [...]

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.

The current rapid advances in generative AI are built on three things. Computing power, some clever coding, and vast amounts of training data. Lots of money can buy you more of the first two, but finding the necessary training material is increasingly hard. Anyone seeking to bolster their competitive advantage through training needs to find [...]

For four years, Trump supporters regularly exploited the federal judiciary, carefully selecting friendly judges in single-judge districts to block Biden administration policies through nationwide injunctions. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, with courts regularly ruling against Trump's executive actions, they're crying foul - claiming an army of radical leftist" judges has secretly [...]

Whether you're a science enthusiast, history buff, or technology geek, Curiosity Stream has something for everyone. Unleash the power of on-demand streaming that allows you to choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, and where you want to watch it. From the comfort of your living room to the remote [...]

What a surprise. The man who clearly doesn't understand tariffs doesn't understand drug trafficking. President Trump has repeatedly claimed the flow of illicit Fentanyl into the United States justifies hitting countries like Mexico, China, and Canada(???) with super-high tariffs, under the weird assumption that starting a trade war is the best move to make in [...]

During Trump 1.0, his captured FCCtook at absolute hatchetto what was left of media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely owned) competitors underfoot. The result has been a rise in local news deserts and [...]

Last year, we discussed Baltimore Ravens QB Lamar Jackson's opposition to a trademark application from retired Hall of Fame QB Troy Aikman for the word and number Eight." While these sorts of oppositions don't traditionally see us caping for them, this case was a bit different. Jackson's registered trademarks were not merely for the term [...]

Last week, we told the story of how the Communications Decency Act came to be. On this week's episode of Otherwise Objectionable, we look at how it quickly went down in flames - except, of course, for the all-important Section 230. Episode 5: Blowback, and the Dust Settles Just four months after being signed into [...]

I'm not going to rehash the entire recent history of book bans/book challenges in this nation. Suffice to say that ever since Trump first took office in 2017, there's been a significant increase in the number of suddenly concerned" citizens seeking to remove books from libraries and a corresponding, equally-significant increase in legislation seeking to [...]

A second child has died from measles. And RFK Jr. attended the funeral. Kennedy said in a social media post that he was working to control the outbreak" and went toGaines Countyto comfort the families who have buried two young children. He was seen late Sunday afternoon outside of a Mennonite church where the funeral [...]

For someone who claims he single-handedly brought free speech back," Donald Trump sure spends a lot of time trying to silence speech he doesn't like. His latest attempt just got demolished by one of his own hand-picked judges, as Judge Trevor McFadden ruled against the administration for its blatantly retaliatory ban of Associated Press reporters [...]

The 2025 Canva Bundle has six courses to help you learn about graphic design. From logo design to business cards to branding to bulk content creation, these courses have you covered. It's on sale for $25. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals [...]

Don't let the White House (or the media!) get away with calling trafficking people they don't like to foreign slave labor camps deportation." As we've noted, deportation involves due process. It also (by definition) means removing a foreigner from a country. As we've covered lately, the government's belief that it can engage in human trafficking [...]

Nearlyevery modernmedical treatmentcan be traced to research funded by the National Institutes of Health: from over-the-counter and prescription medications that treathigh cholesteroland painto protection from infectious diseases such aspolio and smallpox. The remarkable successes of the decades-old partnership between biomedical research institutions and the federal government are so intertwined with daily life that it's easy [...]

There are obviously a wide range of philosophies companies have when it comes to both intellectual property and modding communities that tend to spring up around successful video games. Some are jealous protectors of all things IP, which is generally a giant mistake that limits the reach, the fun, and the engagement these companies should [...]

One of the many interesting aspects of the new wave of artificial intelligence systems is that with them, copyright has moved from the fringe to center stage. There are continuing debates about what role copyright should play in the world of generative AI, not to mention various lawsuits asking the courts to rule on that [...]

T-Mobile has long been a hot mess on issues of security and privacy. Distracted by its problematic merger with Sprint, T-Mobile was hacked eight times in less than five years, leaking oodles of sensitive customer information onto the open web. The company was also a key player in gobbling up user sensitive location data to [...]

Welcome to the arena, Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society! Here's your Streisand Beachfront Property commemorative dinner plates which, we must inform you, contain massive amounts of lead and should never, for any reason, be used as dinner plates. PTK (as its abbreviated everywhere, even by the society" itself) considers itself to be above the frat [...]

No coding experience? This is the course for you. Whether you've dabbled in HTML or never touched a single line of code in your life, the Complete Web Developer Bootcamp will prepare you to take on programming jobs big and small. From basic CSS styling to popular frameworks like Bootstrap, this training will help you [...]

Every little thing the current administration does furthers the ultimate goals of Trump and his enablers: homogenization of the population and elevation of Trump to the position of a demigod. While a lot of that was on display during his first term, the massive acceleration of these efforts during the first few months of Trump [...]

The Supreme Court yesterday effectively provided the executive branch with a technical manual for legally disappearing people to foreign slave labor camps. While claiming to require due process," the Court's ruling dismantles real protections by treating fundamental human rights violations as mere procedural technicalities that can be overcome with minimal paperwork. We've been covering this [...]

We came a bit too close to losing one of the most important First Amendment protections in American history - but at least for now we have a tiny bit of good news. Billionaire Steve Wynn, joining a growing chorus of the wealthy and powerful who want to make it easier to sue critics into [...]

Last week, Mike put together a detailed post explaining the Trump tariff rollout, how the calculations for it were built, some of the more idiotic aspects of it, and basically how stupid the whole program is. If you haven't read the whole thing, you really should. If you want the briefest of summaries: Trump based [...]

Some days, you just have to take the small victories. As the Trump Administration continues to barrage the nation with every terrible thing it can think of doing, it's clear there's no level of reprisal capable of keeping pace. This is one of the small victories, even if it - at first glance - it [...]

More than a decade ago, Congresstried to pass SOPA and PIPA-two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites based on allegations of piracy. The backlash was immediate and massive. Internet users, free speech advocates, and tech companies flooded lawmakers with protests, culminating in anInternet Blackout" [...]

A fusion of authoritarianism and corporatism is destroying what's left of U.S. federal consumer protection. Whether by dodgy Supreme Court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators, the U.S. right, often in lockstep with consolidated corporate power, are making massive, historic, and potentially irreversible inroads in destroying federal corporate oversight, labor protections, public safety provisions, environmental [...]

In what might be the most perfectly on-brand Elon Musk move yet, at the end of March on a Friday evening, Elon Musk suddenly declared that xAI, his AI company that was always connected at the hip with X (which we'd been calling ExTwitter to avoid confusion), was officially acquiring" X at a valuation of [...]

It's no secret that Photoshop can be a bit dense when you're first getting your feet wet with it. That's why it pays to have a expert instructors show you the ropes. Led by a Photoshop pro, the Complete Photoshop Master Class Bundle will help you master Photoshop CC and become an expert-no prior experience [...]

Less than a week ago, the Trump Administration and its assorted haters undermined one of their own lies. Among the many smears leveled against immigrants, the one that claims they're lazy freeloaders who take more than they give back to the US is one of the stupidest. Immigrants pay taxes, even if they're not here [...]

When most people make a serious mistake that harms someone else, they try to fix it. That's basic human decency. But when the Trump administration admits to mistakenly" trafficking someone with protected status to an El Salvador slave labor camp, their response is to mock the judge who ordered them to try to fix it. [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Trump's unhinged trade war that includes uninhabited islands: Reminder: This policy was spearheaded and implemented by a man who thinks nobody says the word groceries" these days because it's an old-fashioned word" and he somehow brought it [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the COVID news continued. Some hospital administrators were trying to silence doctors and nurses from commenting on pandemic shortages, voluntary virus tracking apps were trying to get a grip on the spread, and the UK's NHS was enlisting Palantir to analyze data. We wrote about the tone deafness [...]

Israel-located NSO Group may no longer be a malware option for the US and other discerning governments around the world, thanks to blacklists, lawsuits, and its disturbing willingness to sell to some of the most abhorrent governments of earth. But the market for powerful phone exploits isn't dying up. Governments still want powerful surveillance tech, [...]

If you're the President of the United States and you don't like a law, you can apparently just... decide not to enforce it for a while? I mean, it's not supposed to work that way, but for the past 74 days, that's exactly what's happened with the TikTok ban. Not just ignoring it quietly - [...]

Healthcare.gov, the government health insurance marketplace website, launched in October 2013 only tobuckle under the weightof just 2,000 simultaneous users. As millions of Americans stared at error messages and frozen screens, a political crisis unfolded, but so did a new era of government technology. The result was 18F, an in-house digital services consulting agency that [...]

The measles outbreak that began in Texas continues at a brisk pace. RFK Jr. and his Department of Health and Human Services, as we've discussed, continues to make the outbreak worse through a combination of public opining on alternative treatments that are making some even sicker, garbled messaging that seeks to downplay the severity of [...]

The Complete Cisco Training Bundle has 6 courses to help you get ready to become certified. Courses cover al you need to know as a CCNA, CCEA, and more. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support [...]

Trump has always considered cops to be better people than regular people. Unless they're defending a federal building under attack by Trump's people. Then they're no better than anyone else. Trump's first term came coupled with an announcement that cops would be elevated above the people they're supposed to serve and that the general public [...]

If you think back to Brendan Carr's first tenure as a regular Commissioner at the FCC, he was constantly warning about FCC overreach." We couldn't have privacy rules or net neutrality rules protecting consumers from Comcast, he said, because that would be an extremist abuse of government authority. In fact, any oversight of shitty telecom [...]

We chronicled the implosion of the company Nikola and the fall from grace of its CEO, Trevor Milton, for years. If you don't recall the story, Nikola was built to develop over the road trucks with a hydrogen propulsion system. In 2020, in a bid to gain more investment and boost confidence of current investors, [...]

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 Anchorage Police Department (APD) has concluded its three-month trial of Axon's Draft One, an AI system that uses audio from body-worn cameras to write narrative police reports for officers-and has decided not to retain the technology. Axon touts this technology as force multiplying," claiming itcuts in halfthe amount of time officers usually spend writing [...]