Techdirt

Sycophants do sycophantic things, that much is known. But the level to which newly-minted FCC chairman Brendan Carr has voluntarily debased himself purely to achieve his current station is extraordinary. We knew during the campaign season that Carr was eager to be America's chief censor of any content the Dear Leader disliked. That the same [...]

News moves fast... While this post was getting finalized came news that Marko Elez has resigned after his racist tweets were found and publicized. Nevertheless, the point made herein still stands. Amidst all the news today is news suggesting that Musk and his lackeys have had their access to the federal government's payment systems limited. [...]

A mirror returns exactly what stands before it. No amount of wealth can bribe it, no volume of threats can intimidate it, no technological innovation can reprogram it. A billionaire's reflection shows the same unaltered truth as a beggar's. This fundamental democracy of reflection-this absolute fidelity to physical reality-makes mirrors uniquely immune to power. They [...]

In 1872 California enacted a law declaring that every one who offers to the public to carry persons, property, or messages, excepting only telegraphic messages, is a common carrier of whatever he thus offers to carry." In 2022 the Republican National Committee sued Google, alleging that, by shunting GOP fundraising emails into Gmail spam folders, [...]

The Ultimate Adobe CC Training Bundle has 12 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 $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt [...]

Remember when Donald Trump and the MAGA universe wanted to lock her up!" over Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email server for State Department business? Let's be clear, we found Clinton's use of a personal email server, which she claimed to have used for convenience", deeply problematic but pretty clearly not criminal. And, as [...]

It's understandably not going to get the same attention as the dismantling of numerous government agencies at the hands of rich unelected manbabies, but the Trump administration is also taking aim at all the promising parts of the 2021 infrastructure bill. Especially as it relates to broadband. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) contained [...]

It's very rare to see a cop charged with any crime in a shooting, much less charged with murder. It's even rarer to see a cop convicted. It's been happening a bit more recently, but that may just be recency bias now that more of the country is actively involved in combating police violence. In [...]

It has long been clear that the GOP, as it is today, has a death wish for our Constitutional order, but that's a subject for another post. What's more relevant is that, at this point, one could easily construe that Democrats would like our Constitution to die too. In part because of how enfeebled they [...]

It's 2025 and we're still stuck with legislators who wish it was still 1725. Or possibly any year with B.C appended. Clearly unconstitutional laws are being crafted with alarming frequency these days. Those that aren't trying to legislate morality or criminalize sexual preferences are trying to infuse government entities with state-approved religion. A lot of [...]

Back in 2022, former New York Times reporter Ben Smith and friends launched a new media company namedSemaforon the back of$25 million in donations. You might recall that one of the organization's launch events didn't go particularly well: a trust in news" event that somehow didn't see the problem with platforming and amplifyingmillionaire propagandist Tucker [...]

Just months after we learned Chinese hackers had compromised US telecom systems through government-mandated backdoors, an inexperienced developer from Musk's DOGE unit is pushing untested code directly into the Treasury's payment infrastructure - a system that handles over $6 trillion in federal payments annually. It seems reasonable to call it one of the most dangerous [...]

The Complete Microsoft Windows, 365, and Teams Training Bundle has 7 courses to help you become more adept at using various Microsoft applications. Courses cover implementing Teams, utilizing Microsoft Azure, learning about security in Microsoft 365, and more. It's on sale for $60. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A [...]

There are twenty-four hours in a day. This isn't a matter of political opinion or technological disruption-it's as immutable as the fact that two plus two equals four. No amount of genius, innovation, or reality distortion can create a twenty-fifth hour. This basic truth, so obvious it seems almost foolish to state, exposes something profound [...]

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 conspiracy 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 CEO. [...]

At this point, we have built up enough stories on bad YouTube takedowns to fill up a small library. Because of a combination of automated systems that are spectacularly imperfect, the desire by some bad actors to abuse and commit fraud using the notice and takedown system, and a general deference towards the alleged copyright [...]

As recently noted, New York State now has a law requiring that ISPs (with more than 20,000 subscribers) offer low-income state residents a 25 Mbps broadband tier for $15. Big Telecom didn't much like that, but their efforts to kill the law, first passed in 2021, fell apart when the Supreme Court refused to hear [...]

There's a coup underway in the federal government. Across the rest of the nation, people seeking to endear themselves with President Trump or his supporters are doing the same sort of thing at the state level. Refusing to even acknowledge long-standing rights or court precedent, legislators are becoming the Project 2025 they want to see [...]

The hazard with landing upon a legal solution that seems too good to be true is that it often is. So as you read this post it is important to keep in mind that I may have overlooked something, and there can always be defenses. Few things are guaranteed in law, and even in the [...]

In George Orwell'sNineteen Eighty-Four, the ultimate act of rebellion comes when Winston Smith insists that two plus two equals four, defying a system that demands he accept whatever reality the Party declares. The Party doesn't just want him to say two plus two equals five-they want him to believe it. This demand that citizens deny [...]

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 to run numerous errands around town. AGold Star Membershipincludes a FREE [...]

When even the Wall Street Journal's reliably pro-Trump opinion page starts sounding alarm bells about the administration's policies, something significant has shifted. When even the thinkers" at the most MAGA of think tanks are calling what Elon is doing in the government a true constitutional crisis," we're beginning to see cracks in the snow globe [...]

I don't know if it's the same where you are, but all the pharmacies here in South Seattle have a decidedly... apocalyptic feel. Many shelves are empty. A lot of goods have been locked up to address a retail theft epidemic that didn't actually happen. And understaffed stores are usually overseen by one fifteen year [...]

I'll give the folks over at Good Old Games (GOG) credit: they're certainly doing what they said they were going to do. We've been talking about GOG a fair amount lately, mainly since the platform announced it was pivoting back to focus on its initial raison d'etre: bringing retro, DRM-free games back to a public [...]

After several months of pretending this sort of thing just didn't happen there, the Polish government finally admitted some of its members had abused powerful smartphone malware it had purchased from Israeli spyware firm, NSO Group. This came to light following an investigation that found someone in the government had illegally targeted a Polish government [...]

For years, we've watched self-proclaimed free speech warriors" hyperventilate about imaginary government control of social media content moderation. Mysteriously, as I pointed out last fall, these warriors developed sudden laryngitis when social media platform owners Elon Musk and Donald Trump actually took over the US government. Anyone with a functioning brain knew this would eventually [...]

A coup is underway in the United States, and we must stop pretending otherwise. The signs areunmistakable and accelerating: in just the past 48 hours, Elon Musk's DOGE commission has seized control of Treasury payment systems and gained unauthorized access to classified USAID materials, while security officials who followed protocols were removed. Career civil servants [...]

People sometimes think that cybersecurity is just about defending computer systems from remote adversaries. But it's broader than that; cybersecurity has always been about protecting computer systems more generally from any sort of misuse, no matter how the adversary might access them. So that Elon Musk and his minions have managed to walk right into [...]

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 [...]

Remember the Twitter Files? That carefully orchestrated expose" where incredibly gullible hand-picked journalists were given selective access to internal documents to manufacture misleading outrage about Twitter's content moderation? Get ready for the government edition. If you want to predict what's coming next in Elon Musk's governmental power grab, look no further than his Twitter takeover [...]

During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passed a law requiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn't a huge ask; it costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Trump's Department of Education rolling back anti-book-ban guidance: Remember, kids. If a government is trying this hard to ban books, you should damn well be interested in finding out what those books actually say! In second place, it's That One [...]

It's February, which means this year's edition of the public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929, has come to a close. And we got a record-breaking number of entries this time around, with 34 games submitted (edging out the previous record of 31). That means we've got a lot of work to do judging [...]

One of the more annoying ways that Sony insists on handing itself losses for no reason whatsoever has been its insistance on requiring a PlayStation Network account for cross-platform titles. The company has done this with a bunch of these titles, perhaps most famously so when it did so with Helldivers 2, an early access [...]

Remember how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by ripping apart its infrastructure without understanding it? Now imagine that same playbook applied to the federal government. It's happening, and the stakes are exponentially higher. When reviewing Kate Conger and Ryan Mac's book Character Limit" last fall, I highlighted two devastating patterns in Musk's management: his authoritarian impulse [...]

Last week Techdirt wrote about leading Chinese tech companies being hit with GDPR complaints from noyb.eu concerning the transfer of personal data from the EU to China. More recently, much of the world has been obsessed with another Chinese company, DeepSeek, which operates in the fashionable area of AI chatbots. Most of the discussions have [...]

Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times, has been promising to restore trust in media over the last few months. Instead, he has launched an escalating campaign of editorial interference that accomplishes exactly the opposite. First, he blocked the paper from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Then, he demanded to personally approve all op-ed [...]

There's a particularly insidious and cynical form of censorship gaining prominence in America: the weaponization of free speech" rhetoric, combined with abuses of the judicial system and executive power, to actually suppress speech. It's a strategy that turns the First Amendment's principles inside out, using the language of liberty to justify silencing critics and opponents. [...]

The Python and Django Web Development Bundle has 7 courses to help you learn how to build your own sites and apps. Courses cover the basics of Django and Python and then build upon those skills by having you create your own to do list app and user authentication app, and more. It's on sale [...]

There are lots of things we could be doing to limit school shootings. But none of those have been tried because most people, lobbyists, and politicians continue to believe issuing thoughts and prayers" statements while standing on children's graves is the absolute utmost they should be expected to do. Instead of common sense measures that [...]

To be clear: if there's a policy decision to be made between the consumer interest and big giant shitty telecom monopolies, the Trump FCC is going to always side with the big shitty telecom monopoly. It's why I find the Matt Stoller-type claims that Trump is a serious anti-corporatist keen on reining in corporate power" [...]

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 [...]

So it appears we haven't covered this up to the present, but back in 2020 Francesca Gregorini sued Apple and M. Night Shyamalan for copyright infringement. At issue was a series for Apple TV called Servant and, according to Gregorini, the manner in which the first three episodes of the show copied from Gregorini's movie, [...]

Lawmakers show no sign of slowing down with laws to limit minors' use of social media. State and federal legislation mandating that sites verify users' age and adjust their social media experiences accordingly are still popular, despite the fact that they haverepeatedlyfailedcourt challenges. As of late, policymakers have turned to a different model where parents [...]

It's not the first time. It certainly won't be the last. But every time, we're expected to hang back and assume the FBI is on the right side of history. Something the FBI has tried a couple of times previously is back in the news: the remote access of thousands of computers containing foreign spyware [...]

Transform any speech into written words with an impressive accuracy rate of up to 99% in just three simple steps using Voicetapp, an AI-driven voice to text transcription tool. Voicetapp harnesses the capabilities of a deep learning method called automatic speech recognition (ASR), backed by leading platforms like AWS and GCP. It supports over 170 [...]

In what looks increasingly like a protection racket, Meta has agreed to pay Donald Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit that multiple courts had already indicated was completely meritless. The settlement, which directs $22 million toward Trump's presidential library, comes after a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Trump reportedly told Zuckerberg this needed to be [...]

Last year the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC's E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband [...]

While most of our conversations about Nintendo recently have focused on the somewhat bizarre patent lawsuit the company filed against Pocketpair over the hit game Palworld, traditionally our coverage of the company has focused more on the very wide net of IP bullying it engages in. This is a company absolutely notorious for behaving in [...]

As we mentioned on Saturday, this is the final week of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! The clock is ticking, and now there's just barely more than two days left to get your entries in. The jam closes at this Friday, January 31st, when the clock hits midnight Pacific Time. We're [...]