Techdirt

Support us on Patreon We probably don't need to tell you that the current tariff situation is causing complete chaos in global supply chains, in large part due to the uncertainty - for all we know, the exact rules will have changed since this episode was recorded just yesterday. But we wanted to get some [...]

When last we checked in with CBS, the company was preparing to fold under pressure from the Trump administration, amidst bogus accusations that 60 Minutes had unfairly made Donald Trump look bad. As we've noted previously, the accusations are utterly baseless, but that's apparently not stopping the CBS board from kissing authoritarian ass and throwing [...]

The Party of Free Speech" is at it again. House Speaker Mike Johnson just bragged about using legal threats to remove his opponents' political advertising - perhaps the most constitutionally protected form of speech that exists. And he did it while lying about them lying. As he says in that clip: Do not believe the [...]

The All-Inclusive Adobe CC Training Bundle has 15 courses to help you get the most out of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, After Effects, and more. It's on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt [...]

Donald Trump's two terms in office have proven Orwell right. No, not the 1984 is not an instruction manual" thing. The other one. Animal Farm. Some animals are more equal than others. At the top of the heap? The pigs. Trump led off his first term in office by threatening to create a police state [...]

Google is developing a tried and true reputation for buying products people like, making them worse, then pulling the rug out from under users' feet. That's been a particular problem with Google's purchase of FitBit, which has generally resulted in less useful hardware, more paywalls, more annoying nickel-and-diming efforts, and just a more miserable user [...]

Roughly two weeks ago, in a post about how America was risking losing its elimination status for measles as the current outbreak is exploding thanks to the inaction from RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department, I wrote the following paragraph: At the start of April, we were at 483 confirmed reported measles [...]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. A Treasury Department inspector general is probing efforts by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency to obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, internal communications reviewed by ProPublica show. The office of the Treasury Inspector General [...]

USA Today has secured the DOJ's official rules of engagement for mass deportations under the Alien Enemies Act. (Better yet, it has shared it with everyone, rather than keep it to itself!) Trump's resurrection of a law no one thought the Land of the Free would ever use again is disturbing enough. What's in the [...]

The FTC's politically motivated inquiry into tech censorship" has managed to prove exactly the opposite of what it intended: the government agency is now actively censoring public comments from people complaining about being censored by tech platforms. It's almost too perfect. The FTC, under Chair Andrew Ferguson, launched what it called an investigation into tech [...]

The administration's justification for reviving the justifiably reviled Alien Enemies Act is the literally unbelievable claim that the Venezuelan government has sent Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang members to the United States to wreak general havoc, something the Trump Administration claims is a literal act of war. It's just not happening. There's no link between [...]

The Academy of Educational Engineering is a premier platform tailored for aspiring and professional geeks. This all-in-one educational ecosystem is designed to empower you with expert-level knowledge and hands-on experience across embedded systems, electronics, IoT, and software development. As a premium member, you'll access comprehensive tools, engaging projects, personalized feedback, and direct mentorship, helping you [...]

We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration. It does not involve facts. It does not [...]

When Biden FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel stepped down, we noted how she couldn't be bothered to even mention that terrible things were brewing at her agency. Same for Democratic FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, who recently decided to sheepishly step down without, again, so much as acknowledging the dangerous and radical zealotry Brendan Carr has been [...]

You know, there's stupid, and then there's stupid on a level that is unbelievably dangerous. While RFK Jr. is very busy attempting to ensure that America loses its measles elimination status through a combination of vaccine skepticism, pushing alternative treatments, and generally being unable to present a solid message around the current outbreak, you will [...]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a politician" with the LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois." Barberis, [...]

Oh hooray. Another part of our new normal under Trump 2.0. Here's the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel with the gory details: Milwaukee County Circuit JudgeHannah Duganwas charged April 25 with two felonies on allegations of trying to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest after he appeared in her courtroom. According toa 13-page complaint, Dugan, 65, is accused [...]

Here's a puzzle: How do you write a law that's so badly designed that (1) the people it's meant to help oppose it, (2) the people who hate regulation support it, and (3) everyone involved admits it will be abused? The answer, it turns out, is the Take It Down Act. The bill started with [...]

When Trump officials want to censor speech, they don't quite say we want to censor speech" (after all, they pretend to be the party that brought free speech back.") Instead, they find ways to threaten organizations by pretending it's got nothing to do with the content, even as they can't hide their true intentions and [...]

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 [...]

Does anyone want to be OK with this just because it might end up barely clearing the legality bar? Is this what the US wants to be known for: the forcible expulsion of anyone originating south of our borders just because the current administration doesn't want to share space with undocumented (but otherwise law-abiding) immigrants? [...]

State laws attempting to make it cheaper and easier to repair your own technology continue to gain steam. With the recent introduction ofa new right to repair" law in Wisconsin, groups like U.S. PIRGnotethat all 50 U.S. states have now at leastintroducedsuch bills. But so far only Massachusetts, New York, Minnesota, Colorado,California, andOregon have actually [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Mamba with a response to a failed fact check" by another commenter: Hey twinkle farts, President Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor to authorize the government to detain enemy aliens. Further, the executive order didn't need to [...]

It's time for the third in our series of posts about the winners of this year's public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! We've already covered the Best Remix and Best Deep Cut, and today we're looking at the winner of the Best Visuals category: A Warning by DigNZ. One of the requirements for [...]

Bethesda has something of a history of embracing its modding communities. This has historically included not being aggressive on matters of IP against modders, attempting to build an economy around the modding community itself, and even being quite tolerant of fan-made expansions and the like of the publisher's titles. This was all well and good [...]

Gavin Newsom'scharacterizationof the Abrego Garcia deportation as a distraction" represents a catastrophic failure of moral clarity and constitutional understanding. This isn't a distraction. This is the constitutional foundation of our Republic hinging on a single case. Let's be absolutely clear about what's at stake: The Supreme Court has issued a unanimous 9-0 order demanding that [...]

This post is about two things: that it looks like DOGE has violated an injunction, at least in spirit if not letter, and why it matters. The injunction in question arose in the hybrid case, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO v. Social Security Administration, which named both DOGE and agency officials [...]

The people most loudly (misleadingly) complaining about censorship just... helped enable actual censorship. Not metaphorical censorship, not they won't let me tweet slurs" censorship, but literal we're going to stop research into fighting actual government censorship" censorship. It's painfully stupid, but that's just what we get with the folks running the government these days. This [...]

Get the skills you need to become a software tester with the Ultimate Software Testing Bundle. Software testing is performed to identify differences between given input and expected output and to verify that software products function according to pre-defined requirements. Courses cover the basics, Bugzilla, JIRA, testing techniques, Java TestNG, and more. It's on sale [...]

What could possibly go wrong? Operatives from ElonMusk's so-calledDepartment of Government Efficiency(DOGE) are building a master database at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that could track and surveil undocumentedimmigrants, two sources with direct knowledge tell WIRED. DOGE is knitting together immigration databases from across DHS and uploading data from outside agencies including the Social [...]

A few days ago I talked about how the Trump administration is desperate to present the illusion it still cares about consumer protection and antitrust reform." Via executive order, regulatory capture, DOGE cuts, and a rightward-lurching court system, Trump 2.0 really is taking an absolute hatchet to consumer protection, labor rights, corporate oversight, environmental law, [...]

Leaks can be both embarrassing and aggravating for any content producer, though we often see the most anger over this sort of thing coming from large corporate interests. The video game space is lousy with examples of this, but there is perhaps no more notoriously draconian respondent to leaks than Nintendo. The company has unsurprisingly [...]

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 [...]

Another day, another new bit of ugliness from the Trump Administration. What was first reported by MedPage Today appears to be the initial wave of attacks on medical journals for preferring scientific rigor to splashing around in the swampier parts of the marketplace of ideas. A federal prosecutorsent a letterto a medical journal editor, probing [...]

There are a few ways to think about Elon Musk's announcement this week that he's stepping back from DOGE. The first is that he's leaving a job he officially doesn't have. The second is that he's returning to a job (Tesla CEO) that he's supposedly been doing this whole time. The third, and perhaps most [...]

The Raspberry Pi and Arduino Bootcamp Bundle has 5 courses to help you dive into the world of hands-on programming. Courses cover Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and ROS2. 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. The [...]

Gang databases are just handy racism. They're a way for cops to harass, arrest, or otherwise make minorities' lives more miserable. Very little in the way of logic or evidence is required to allow officers to add people to these databases. That's why victims of gang violence and the occasional infant have been labelled gang [...]

There's simply no limit of problems in telecom and media that competent FCC regulatorscouldbe taking aim at.Broadband price gouging by monopolies, widespreadtelecom privacy and security failures, the obvious harm ofunchecked media consolidationall come quickly to mind. Instead of tackling any of this, new Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr has spent the lion's share of his [...]

The fear over industry disruptions due to technological advances is so predictable that we have the entire buggy whip" analogy pre-built to rebut it. For the uninitiated, the analogy harkens back to when the automobile came into wide circulation and the disruption it had on the makers of horse buggy tools, like the whip for [...]

As Artificial Intelligence reshapes the internet landscape, we're watching history repeat itself: The same people who fundamentally misunderstood Section 230's role in enabling the modern internet are now making eerily similar mistakes about how we should approach AI regulation. This week's episode of Otherwise Objectionable dives into these parallel debates, exploring both how Section 230's [...]

For a long time, we've believed no president would dare enact the Alien Enemies Act again, not after it was abused to send more than 100,000 residents and citizens of Japanese descent to US concentration camps during the Second World War. Even the administrative power grabs and uptick in bigotry that followed the 9/11 attacks [...]

Last fall Trump sued CBSclaimed (falsely) that a 60 Minutes interview of Kamala Harris had been deceitfully edited" to her benefit (they simply shortened some of her answers for brevity, as news outlets often do). AsMike explored, the lawsuit was utterly baseless, and tramples the First Amendment, editorial discretion, and common sense. CBS/Paramount is looking [...]

The Trump administration's attempt to rendition people to El Salvador without due process has hit another judicial roadblock. Judge Charlotte Sweeney in Colorado has blocked the government from using the improper Alien Enemies Act to remove noncitizens from the US without due process. The administration's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act is both legally absurd [...]

Embedded systems are at the heart of modern innovation, powering everything from smart devices to automotive technology. This Embedded Systems Engineer Mastery Bundle has 10 courses to help equip you with the skills to design, program, and implement microcontroller-based solutions. Gain hands-on experience with Arduino, PIC, and ESP32, master C programming for embedded applications, and [...]

When a federal judge starts calling out government lawyers for willful and bad faith" behavior and deliberate evasion of fundamental discovery obligations," you know things have gotten serious. But in the case of Abrego Garcia - the man who the DOJ admitted they accidentally sent to a Salvadoran gulag without due process - the DOJ [...]

For decades, major wireless carriers AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile collected vast troves of sensitive user location and movement data, then sold access to any random nitwit with two nickels to rub together. The result was a parade of scandals wherein everybody fromstalkers, law enforcement(orpeople pretending to be law enforcement), car companies, governments, and right wing [...]

A handful of Seattle police officers who had nothing better to do on January 6, 2021 than support a man whose followers spent the next several hours assaulting cops and committing a number of federal crimes are asking the Supreme Court to prevent having their names disclosed to public records requesters. Using John Doe" pseudonyms, [...]

While I'm sure all of us would like to completely forget about COVID-19, it is simply the case that the virus hasn't forgotten about us. Gone are the days of the pandemic, of course, so this isn't meant to fear monger. But the fact is that hundreds of Americans are still dying of this disease [...]

Support us on Patreon It's hard to create a law about children online without first identifying who the children are. We've written a lot about the problems that arise with mandated age verification, and a new paper by Eric Goldman, The Segregate-and-Suppress" Approach to Regulating Child Safety Online, digs into why the entire popular approach [...]

It's no longer about you," Marco Rubio declared in 2023, describing the transformative moment of becoming a father. It's the first time in my life that I have been responsible, entirely at that stage, for the life of another human being." The Senator has repeatedly stressed the critical importance of fathers being present, going so [...]