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There's a peculiar form of blindness that comes from prolonged safety. Like a frog in slowly heating water, people who have known only stability become incapable of recognizing existential threats until they're already overwhelmed by them. This isn't just normal human shortsightedness-it's a specific kind of cognitive failure bred by generations of relative peace and [...]

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Trump's first presidency brought a lot of latent human ugliness to the surface. It stayed there during the four years he sat, sulked, broke laws, lost lawsuits, and continued to stoke the fires of hate. Now, he's leveraging the hatred his last term in office turned into part of everyday politics to inflict further misery [...]

We've long noted how the race to 5G" was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager tosell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it's more of an evolution than a revolution. But that's not what telecom giants like Verizon, [...]

The phrase no harm, no foul" doesn't apply to law enforcement personnel, whether they're patrol officers or the chief local prosecutor. Instead - thanks to the qualified immunity doctrine - the phrase is: whatever amount of harm, no foul." As long as the harm isn't something specifically covered by precedent, the general feeling of courts [...]

America, which used to be a serious country run by adults, has since devolved into something else. We were just talking about how the White House had made the brilliant decision to bar AP News reporters from all kinds of official briefings. Why? Well, because the AP refused to update its influential Stylebook to refer [...]

First, the bad news: a court yesterday declined to immediately enjoin Musk and DOGE, as New Mexico and 13 other states had asked it to do. But don't panic: it was a heavy lift to get what they were asking for, and even though they didn't get it now, their quest continues. With this case [...]

Here's a dumb thing that happened: Elon Musk's ExTwitter just agreed to pay Donald Trump $10 million to settle a lawsuit that ExTwitter had already won. (Yes, you read that right: already won.) This is becoming something of a pattern in tech and media these days - call it the digital-age protection racket. The plot [...]

Apparently, ICE is feeling it might deal with a bit more backlash than normal now that Trump is back in charge and promising to expel as many immigrants as he can as quickly as he can. Rather than deal with it like grownups with big boy pants and black ICE shirts, the agency has decided [...]

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, [...]

Here's a neat trick for saving taxpayers billions of dollars: just make stuff up! I mean, sure, you could do all the hard work of actually finding government waste and fixing inefficient processes. But why bother when you can just... invent numbers? (This is not financial advice.) The innovator of this approach - and I [...]

Last November you might recall that Wiredreleased an excellent reportdocumenting how it was trivial to buy the sensitive and detailed movement data of U.S. military and intelligence workers as they moved around Germany. The culprit, as usual, was a global collection of super dodgy data brokers and adtech firms that see little in the way [...]

Long time readers of Techdirt will recall the deluge of posts we did years ago on trademark disputes within the craft beer industry. While trademark issues in that industry certainly haven't gone entirely away, they are nothing like what was occurring between 2015 and 2020. In that time period, it felt like I was writing [...]

The NYPD is proving it's impossible to fix an entity that doesn't want to improve. It has engaged in more than a decade of straight-up ignoring court-ordered reforms of its stop-and-frisk program. The program's original form was declared unconstitutional in 2013. Since then, it has only marginally improved. And much of that improvement is probably [...]

You probably saw that one of Donald Trump's early executive orders was to demand that the Gulf Of Mexico be renamed the Gulf Of America. It's pointless pseudo-productivity, and an obvious effort to excite his base's nationalist and racist tendencies. Amoral cowards at Google got right to work making the change in their map products, [...]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a fairly wild suggestion: if you spend years calling yourself a free speech absolutist" while decrying government censorship," maybe one of your first moves after taking over the government shouldn't be demanding prison sentences for journalists who report things you don't like. But that's [...]

Germany's history informs its current laws. That much is undeniable. But it doesn't excuse the over-correction applied by legislators in hopes of heading off another Hitler. And it certainly doesn't excuse prosecutors who are prosecuting hate speech" in Germany. The country's hate speech law has been problematic since its inception. Within days of its debut [...]

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Here's a silly thing that happens sometimes: A powerful person says something obviously false, and everyone pretends not to notice. This is the plot of The Emperor's New Clothes," where an entire kingdom maintains a collective delusion until one child (who, importantly, hasn't yet learned the sophisticated art of lying to yourself) points out that [...]

Suing Elon Musk and DOGE has finally led to at least one thing: the White House now finally defining Musk's role in government. On Monday night, in the New Mexico v. Musk, it claimed him as a an employee of the White House Office" with only the ability to advise the President, or communicate the [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the Trump administration suing Illinois over state laws around immigration enforcement: Republicans believe in states rights up until states start doing things Republicans don't like. In second place, it's Maura with thoughts on whether or not people voted for [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, copyright troll Richard Liebowitz dropped a case after suing on behalf of the wrong party and trying to swap plaintiffs, while copyright troll Strike 3 got shut down by a judge and hit with $40k in legal fees. We looked at how US antitrust enforcement was clearly broken, [...]

I'm going to keep pounding the drum for personal liability against Musk and DOGE, partly to scare them into backing off from their unlawful seizure of our government, and eventually to compensate us for the immense harm they've caused. So far it doesn't seem like anyone has tried to personally sue them for damages, but [...]

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 [...]

Updated: make sure you read the update at the end of this story. Here's a fun thing about corruption investigations: Usually when prosecutors uncover one quid pro quo, they don't resolve it by offering an even bigger quid pro quo. And yet, that appears to be exactly what's happening with NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who [...]

Perhaps the only headline just as repeatable as No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" is this other banger from The Onion: Drugs Win Drug War. 50+ years of hardline prohibition have only resulted in better prices, better purity, and a slew of states legalizing or decriminalizing personal use amounts [...]

When you're playing with house money, playing one losing hand after another isn't a sign of tenacity. It's just a way of signaling you can't be trusted with the house's money. That's why appeal after appeal from government entities don't tend to indicate that they're in the right. It just means they don't care how [...]

Linux and UNIX operating systems have become increasingly popular in commercial computing environments. Due to their rapid growth in today's businesses, Linux/UNIX administrators have also become very much in demand. This Linux/UNIX Training Bundle will help you learn the knowledge and skills to install, configure, & support a Linux/UNIX server, and more. It's on sale [...]

If you want to write something on the U.S. government's official DOGE website, apparently you can just... do that. Not in the usual way of submitting comments through a form, mind you, but by directly injecting content into their database. This seems suboptimal. The story here is that DOGE - Elon Musk's collection of supposed [...]

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless growth of growth's sake" megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions (like equating password sharing with piracy") - [...]

There are things you can and can't do when setting up checkpoints. If it's DUI enforcement, you can talk to drivers and see if they seem intoxicated. If it's near a border, you can stop every vehicle to search for undocumented immigrants or contraband. What you can't do, however, is just set up a checkpoint [...]

While democracy burns, corporate America is busy checking the wind direction. Googlerenamesthe Gulf of Mexico to flatter a wannabe autocrat's ego. Business leaders draft contingency plans for the end of constitutional government. And the Democratic Party, funded by these same genuflecting corporations, responds with all the urgency of someone scheduling a dental cleaning. This isn't [...]

Way back in the far more innocent times of 2012, we covered a brief but tense dispute between Google and Iran over the lack of a label for the Persian Gulf on Google Maps. Ostensibly so as not to upset anyone about the name of that body of water, given that there was some dispute [...]

Last July, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to have shut the door on constitutional discussions of geofence warrants. These so-called warrants operate from a point of ignorance. Investigators have no idea who they're looking for. So, they ask Google to do some of the work for them. Casting a small dragnet around a [...]

Given that there does not seem to have been a single thing Trump has done since entering office that has been legal, nor has his lackey Musk (or is it Trump that's the lackey...?), there is not a single thing that doesn't require litigation to challenge and enjoin. But we're starting to see the floodgates [...]

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Here's a story about being wrong. Not just regular wrong - we're all wrong sometimes! - but spectacularly, publicly, I'm going to double down again and again and again on this obviously false thing even after being corrected" wrong. This week, Elon Musk stood in the Oval Office at the White House and was finally [...]

Since his appointment by Trump in 2017, the FCC's Brendan Carr has never stood up to telecom giants on any issue of substance to consumers. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about the company's destruction of net neutrality, privacy violations, bullshit hidden fees, or its technically unnecessary usage caps, there's nothing a company like Comcast [...]

It's always interesting to me to see companies identify what they see as a threat by looking at what type of content they attempt to DMCA or otherwise disappear. When actual direct and flagrant wholesale copying of a digital product occurs, you can understand why the takedowns are issued. We might still want to argue [...]

Terumo Cardiovascular, a company that makes six-figure medical equipment used in heart surgeries, is apparently keen on attracting the ire of the right to repair" movement. But given the Trump administration's assault on state and federal consumer protection, it's not clear they'll face many meaningful repercussions for it. In a letter obtained by 404 Media, [...]

Billionaires are already deleting parts of our government, as well as various safety mechanisms on the internet that sought to minimize hate and abuse. Do we also want them to be able to rewrite our understanding of the First Amendment? Steve Wynn's latest Supreme Court petition represents a dangerous escalation in the ongoing assault on [...]

Late last fall, a number of Norfolk, Virginia residents - with the assistance of the Institute for Justice (IJ) - sued the city for blanketing Norfolk with nearly 200 automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) provided by Flock Safety. Flock Safety made its first inroads with the private market, selling plate readers to gated communities and [...]

Another day, another computer system for DOGE to unlawfully access. This time it is the one running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the latest to be unlawfully shut down. Bloomberg is reporting that this time the DOGE bros incursion into the systems came with some sort of MOU, which did a few things [...]

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It turns out that when you let the world's richest man take over significant portions of the federal government, some people might get nervous. Who knew? Last week we wrote about how some staunch conservatives were finally admitting that Elon's takeover of the government represented a constitutional crisis. Then earlier this week, we showed how [...]

We'velong notedhow absurd it is that scammers, debt collectors, and greedy telemarketers have ruined our voice communications networks. We've somehow just normalized it. We've also noted how a big reason our robocall problem never gets fixed is because Congress and regulators routinely fixate on scammers and not on the legit" companies like debt collectors thatuse [...]

Techdirt has been writing about India's huge Aadhaar database of biometrics, which assigns a unique 12-digit number to all Indian citizens, for a decade now. The system was introduced to make it easier for people in India to access key government services by authenticating their identity, but there were soon plans to allow businesses to [...]

Wake up, Neo. The Matrix has you." Thesewordsmarked a cultural moment-one that captured our collective anxiety about reality itself.The Matrixwasn't just a movie about robots and kung fu. It was a story about questioning the systems of power and control that shape our understanding of the world. Thered pillbecame a powerful metaphor for choosing difficult [...]

If cops aren't going to follow the law or the Constitution, I don't know why we're expecting them to adhere to end user agreements. It's not just the fake social media profiles officers and investigators use. It's also the tech they deploy. No matter how well facial recognition tech may perform, it's still problematic. And [...]

There have been legitimate debates about whether the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act - which makes it a criminal act for US entities to bribe foreign government officials - sometimes creates gray areas in international business. For example, over a decade ago, the Walmart Mexico case highlighted how Walmart payments to speed up" permitting to build [...]