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There's little that's more impermeable than the US border. I mean, people flow across it all the time, often without being vetted, but courts seem to agree the only thing that really matters is what border agencies are trying (and failing) to accomplish. Whatever rights need to be abridged, paused, or outright discarded are just [...]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is proposing a new rule limiting data brokers' ability to sell Americans' sensitive personal and financial information... assuming it survives the looming corruption-fueled assault on corporate oversight under the pretense of efficiency." According to an agency press release, the agency is looking to update the Fair Credit Reporting Act [...]

Cops just seem to love killing people's pets. While this act is often justified" by (often ridiculous) claims of officer safety," a whole lot of killing of people's dogs seems to happen just because law enforcement officers have the means and the opportunity to carry this act out. Nothing involving the killing of people's dogs [...]

We've talked plenty about the ways that the DMCA process specifically is wide open for fraud and abuse. There are plenty of forms this sort of thing can take, of course, but one of the more troubling among them is the use of the DMCA process specifically to disappear critical commentary that a copyright holder [...]

Support us on Patreon We've written about the many signs that Trump FCC pick Brendan Carr is eager to be America's top censor. Recently, Mike once again joined Andy Levy on The New Abnormal podcast for a discussion about how much of a threat Carr represents to free speech and the First Amendment, and you [...]

This is probably the correct conclusion to arrive at, at least at this point in extremely limited jurisprudence, but it still raises some questions courts will likely have to confront in the future. Is manhandling a phone to make it responsive to a search itself a search, or does the Fourth Amendment not kick in [...]

In May 2022 Thierry Breton, at the time a prominent European Commissioner, went to Texas and dropped in on Elon Musk, who was then on his way to buying Twitter. During his visit, Breton did something remarkable: he showed that Elon, whatever his other accomplishments, is a sucker's sucker. In a video posted on social [...]

The 2021 infrastructure bill is poised to deliver$42.5billionin broadband subsidies to the states under a program called Broadband Equity, Access, And Deployment (BEAD). This program has been slow sledding, because America's broadband maps were absolute garbage, requiring that states work overtime to fix our broadband maps and ensure the money is spent semi-wisely. Republicans and [...]

One of the most important shifts in computing over the last few decades has been the increasing use of open source software on nearly every platform, from cloud computing to smartphones (well, I would say that). For the distributed development methodology pioneered by Linus Torvalds with Linux to work, modularity is key. It allows coders [...]

This may not mean much in the grand scheme of things but it's good to see these objections on the record. It's incremental, but in these times, every increment helps, especially when the Supreme Court seems actively disinterested in discussing cases in which government officials might be found to be in the wrong. Cert has [...]

If you're not of a certain age, you may not be entirely familiar with the story of Enron, the once-vaunted energy and bandwidth trading company that went down in one of the most public bankruptcy and financial scandals of all time. It all ended in 2001, with several Enron executives being charged with accounting fraud [...]

In the only country in the world where this sort of violence happens frequently enough it's become a despairing meme, legislators continue to ignore the obvious solutions in favor of throwing money at esoteric options that won't stop Americans from entering schools to murder children en masse. In Texas, this problem hits home harder. Not [...]

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 [...]

Over the weekend, I saw Andy Baio post on Bluesky an amusing experiment in response to Mark Sample posting about how the name David Mayer" appears to break ChatGPT: The David Mayer" issue got a fair bit of attention in some corners of the media, as lots of people tried to figure out what was [...]

For decades, U.S. cable and broadband providers have statistically had some of the worst customer support and satisfaction ratings of any industry or government agency in America (see: the American Customer Satisfaction Index). That's quite a feat in a country where banks, airlines, insurance companies, and medical giants intensely compete to deliver vast untold frustration [...]

If you haven't been following along on our posts about a trademark dispute between the famed Ravinia Festival Association (RFA) and Ravinia Brewing for the last decade or so, here is a quick synopsis. The RFA operates the Ravinia Festival outdoor music venue north of Chicago. Ravinia" isn't a fanciful name, as locals here know. [...]

Yes, it's that time of year again! We're gearing up for the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! We've been running these game jams ever since 2019, when new works began entering the public domain in the US for the first time in over two decades, as a [...]

Scores of organizations from across the anti-pornography movement have filed amicus briefs supporting the state of Texas and Attorney General Ken Paxton in a U.S. Supreme Court case dealing with his state's draconian age verification law. In 2023, members of the Texas legislature adopted House Bill (HB) 1181, which explicitly singles out online adult platforms [...]

Just weeks after a court swiftly struck down California's unconstitutional deepfake" law, a similar challenge is underway in Minnesota (using the same plaintiff and same lawyers) - and the state's defense is off to an inauspicious start, with one of their own expert witnesses submitting a declaration that cites non-existent research, hallucinated" by the very [...]

Costco 1-Year Gold Star Membership Plus $45 Digital Costco Shop Card 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 [...]

If you put cops in schools, this is what you get: On the morning of January 10, 2020, a parent complained to school officials about a sketch N.B. and other students had drawn in response to another student bullying N.B. The parent unreasonably insisted that school officials call the police. After arriving on school grounds, [...]

The FCC has long run an $8 billion federal subsidy program to help bring phone and broadband services to lower income homes and schools called theUniversal Service Fund. The historically bipartisan program has long been funded by a fee on traditional phone lines. But with traditional phone lines dying, there's been a long, ongoing discussion [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment on our post about the push to post the Ten Commandments in school, in reply to a comment asking us not to insult the people asking for this: Yes, we could avoid insulting Christian nationalists who want to [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the EU was pushing back against the US on the topic of strong encryption, while Pennsylvania's Supreme Court said compelled password production violates the fifth amendment. We learned more about how freely Amazon gave cops access to Ring doorbell recordings, and about how much California was raking in [...]

As you likely know by now, we are running a Kickstarter to fund the release of One Billion Users, our new card game about building the biggest and best social media network. Earlier this week, Mike wrote about the game's roots in Touring and Mille Bornes and explained some of the new mechanics we've added, [...]

We're waiting for the lawsuit in Japan between Nintendo, The Pokemon Co., and Pocketpair, the developers of the hit game Palworld to really get going. In the meantime, the public commentary is filling the information void, including commentary from IP experts. The suit revolves around a series of patents the plaintiffs hold that cover a [...]

We've noted how Trump's win means that Brendan Carr (R, AT&T) will now be in charge of the nation's top telecom and media regulator. We've also made it very clear his tenure will involve dismantling whatever's left of FCC broadband consumer protection, killing remaining media consolidation limits, and threatening to pull the broadcast licenses of [...]

When Donald Trump announced that he was appointing current FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr to be the next chair of the FCC, it was no surprise. Nor was it a surprise that Trump tried to play up that Carr was a warrior for free speech." Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought [...]

ICE has never been opposed to mass surveillance. It has used everything it possibly can to locate Trump's so-called bad hombres" and subject them to family separation and a detainment infrastructure incapable of handling the former president's (and now President-elect) masturbatorial fantasies about border invasions." ICE buys location info from data brokers to evade warrant [...]

The 2024 Microsoft Essential Tools Training Bundle will help you become a Microsoft expert in no time. Courses cover Microsoft 365, Excel, Word for beginners, and Word advanced. It's on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. [...]

When your rap track diss battle ends in whiny proto-SLAPP suits, I'm going to suggest you've officially lost. If you ever want to see this dril tweet as a legal filing (two actually), I think it's in Drake's semi-SLAPPy demands for discovery and depositions from Universal Music, Spotify, and iHeartRadio for having the temerity to... [...]

After literally decades of rumor and speculation, fading satellite TV companies Dish and DirecTV finally recently announced they had proposed a pointless merger in a last gasp for relevance. Once blocked by regulatory worries about competitive impact, executives at both companies had long dreamed of combining the two companies into one, still broadly unremarkable company. [...]

It's been over a year since we last talked about the trademark dispute between Katy Perry, the American pop star, and Katie Perry, an Australian woman with a fashion line. To bring you up to speed, and I'll use first names here to keep the confusion at a minimum, Katy sold merchandise for her 2014 [...]

I come here not to bury this Wired article, nor to damn it with faint praise. I come to critique it, while realizing the framing and (especially!) the headline may not be the direct responsibility of its author, Paresh Dave. Privacy laws are hit and miss in the United States. Mostly miss. There's not a [...]

Support us on Patreon Last week, we launched the crowdfunding campaign for One Billion Users, our new card game where players compete to build the biggest and best social media network. As is tradition when we launch a new game, myself and our game design partner Randy Lubin joined Mike on an episode of the [...]

Way back in the day (1971, to be precise), the Supreme Court created a cause of action to sue federal officers over rights violations. The original case, Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents, involved Webster Bivens and the warrantless search of his Brooklyn home by FBN (Federal Bureau of Narcotics - the precursor to the [...]

The Complete ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Training Bundle has 4 beginner-friendly courses to help you become more comfortable with the capabilities of OpenAI and ChatGPT. You'll learn how to write effective prompts to get the best results, how to create blog posts and sales copy, and how to create your own chatbots. It's on sale [...]

Last week we launched the Kickstarter for our amazing new card game, One Billion Users. It's a fast, fun card game where players try to build up the biggest and best social media network, while simultaneously trying to undermine the networks the other players are trying to build. In the campaign, we mentioned a couple [...]

We've noted more than once that the 2021 infrastructure bill is poised to deliver $42.5 billion in broadband subsidies to the states. A lot of that money will be thrown in the lap of incumbents with long histories of empty promises, but a lot of it will be leveraged for genuine, major improvements in broadband [...]

There isn't a ton of new information here to get into, but we might as well close the loop on this episode. Way back during the 2020 Presidential campaign, then-President Donald Trump's reelection campaign put out an admittedly humorous animated video showing a massive Trump train barreling down the tracks, only to have Joe Biden [...]

Making the bold assumption their voting bloc could read, Louisiana legislators passed a law earlier this year that mandates the posting of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom. Building on the inexplicable support of people who would find Trump's actions and statements reprehensible if they were carried out by anyone else, legislators are [...]

Whether you like the results or not, there's no denying that the EU's GDPR legislation has tackled a wide range of privacy problems in the online world. Other countries around the globe - including the US - may lack comparable national legislation but there are alternative ways of protecting people's privacy, as a recent ruling [...]

You can't trust cops around your personal info, data, communications, or pretty much anything. Officers have a lot of power and access to plenty of databases filled with personal info. They abuse this power and access frequently. Here's some (recent) historical perspective. In July 2024, a female police officer was awarded a $1 million settlement [...]

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 [...]

What stupid times we live in. President-elect Donald Trump has ordered Republicans to kill a widely-supported bipartisan journalism shield law that would protect press freedom and whistleblowers. Many people voted for Donald Trump on the false belief that he would protect free speech." But in reality, nearly every instinct he has is to stifle free [...]

Look: I think it was nice for a change that the Biden administration at least paid some passing but inconsistent lip service to antitrust reform. It was a lovely change of pace from decades of feckless careerists who pay empty lip service to market innovation while rubber stamping mindless consolidation at every turn. And a [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Elon Musk's hypocrisy on the subject of boycotts: Advertisers fleeing Twitter aren't even boycotting it. They're just each making their own decisions for themselves. A boycott is a group action in the group's longer-term interest, even if it is against [...]

This week, we launched the crowdfunding campaign for our new card game, One Billion Users, where players compete to build the biggest and best social media network. We've put a lot of work into designing a fun, fast-paced game and we need your help to produce it - so if you want to try your [...]

It's amazing just how many of the trademark disputes we see and discuss here at Techdirt ultimately result from the USPTO granting trademarks that never should have been granted in the first place. In the food industry specifically, we saw this recently in the whole Taco Tuesday" episode, in which the Trademark Office granted Taco [...]

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 [...]