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This week, we've got a double winner taking first place for both insightful and funny. It's Strawb with a comment about Darren Beattie embracing the Twitter Files playbook: Trump: We will stop waste, fraud and abuse in the goverment!" Beattie: Starts a project that wastes government time and money, and creates a fraudulent narrative that [...]

This is a brief detour 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, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and Best Adaptation, but before we move on to the last two categories (Best Analog Game and Best Digital [...]

The state of American health is in crisis at the moment due to a confluence of things entirely created by the current administration. Putting RFK Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services (HHS) never felt like anything other than a move designed to troll Trump's detractors and it shows. As the measles outbreak that [...]

Gavin Newsom's rightward shift represents not just a strategic miscalculation but a profound moral abdication based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both democratic principles and political reality. Newsom appears to haveconvinced himselfthat the path to defeating Trumpism lies in adopting its language, accepting its framing, and finding common ground" with an administration actively dismantling constitutional [...]

Correction/Update: In this original article, I included a quote from DHS that I thought was in response to today's order, which implied DHS believed they could still detain Ozturk, but it appears it was in response to the earlier ruling on Wednesday when she was first ordered to be transferred. We have removed that quote [...]

In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recentlyreached an agreementallowing the IRS to share with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taxpayer information of certain immigrants. The redacted 15-pagememorandum of understanding(MOU) was exposed in a court case,Centro de Trabajadores Unidos v. Bessent, which seeks to prevent [...]

LabsDigest is built for those who learn best by doing. Whether you're preparing for a CompTIA certification or diving into Python development, our platform offers interactive labs that simulate real-world tasks-no passive watching or reading, just real experience. Work through performance-based exercises for CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, and more, or sharpen your coding skills with [...]

Oh, so we're still doing this, huh. Despite pretty much every effort of this type being rejected by courts as, shall we say, constitutionally-improbable, legislators continue to believe that cops should be protected from the people they serve by laws that allow them to violate the rights of the people they serve. Here's the latest [...]

By now most sentient people realize Trump's tariffs are a mindlessly descructive gambit that's going to decimate inventory, drive smaller companies out of business, and significantly drive up costs for American consumers. There's bottomless evidence that the clumsy effort to bully the planet was concocted by imbeciles, and most countries have justifiably told the Trump [...]

I've ranted and raved enough about how RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department are completely fucking up the response to the current measles outbreak enough that I'm confident you all don't need me to rehash the entire thing in this opening. We can leave it at this: we're probably going to lose [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Last month, a Department of Government Efficiency aide at the nation's consumer watchdog agency was told by ethics attorneys that he held stock in companies that employees are forbidden from owning - and was advised not to participate in any actions that could benefit him personally, [...]

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are not a privacy panacea, but they do empower Internet users in important ways. Proof of that can be found in the constant attempts by governments around the world to control who can use VPNs and for what purpose, most recently in Italy and Brazil. Hackread reports on another such move [...]

The Intelligence Community just demonstrated, in spectacular fashion, exactly how badly Donald Trump and his ODNI chief Tulsi Gabbard misrepresented the laughable supposed invasion" of the US by Venezuelan gangs. And they did it by responding to a Freedom of Information Act request in what may be record time - just six business days. For [...]

uTalk can help you start speaking like a native within minutes. Using the uTalk learning App you can listen to real native speakers to help you navigate through your next vacation or business trip.With more than 2,500 words and phrases to learn in each of our 140+ languages, the app gives you a running start [...]

Trump was never about law and order. He cozied up to cops and praised police brutality, but when push came to literal shove, he sat back and watched his supporters attack law enforcement officers and commit federal crimes for the sole purpose of destroying democracy itself. Now that he's back in office, he's back to [...]

We've documented for decades how U.S. telecom is an uncompetitive mess dominated by politically powerful telecom monopolies that see no competition and effectively own Congress. As a result, the U.S. telecom and broadband market is an uncompetitive mess, with Americans still seeing higher prices, slower speeds, spottier access, and worse customer service than in many [...]

It can be really amazing just how bad video game companies have been, and currently still are, when it comes to preserving the very culture that they help to create. While groups like GOG are at least attempting to pressure more developers and publishers to take efforts to preserve older games, it's simply a fact [...]

Last yearTrumplicans killeda popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC'sAffordable Connectivity Program(ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefitting at its peak. At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, [...]

Once again, the Texas legislature is coming after the most common method of safe and effective abortion today-medication abortion. Senate Bill (S.B.) 2880*seeks to prevent the sale and distribution of abortion pills-but it doesn't stop there. By restricting access to certain information online, the bill tries to keep people from learning about abortion drugs, or [...]

Remember the Lois Lerner scandal? For years, it was the Republican party's Exhibit A of Obama administration overreach - proof that Democrats were weaponizing the IRS to target conservative groups. The outrage was endless. The GOP-led congressional investigations were relentless. The rhetoric about threats to democracy was breathless. Funny thing about that: it turned out [...]

Splunk is a powerful data platform used to gather information from multiple sources and index it for efficient access. You can then use collected data to create visualizations, analytics, and a variety of automated and security-related functions. With its web-style interface, Splunk is easy to use and is utilized by many companies worldwide.The 2025 Complete [...]

This has always been the truth. And it has always been ignored by people like Donald Trump, who combine if it bleeds, it leads" media narratives with the always-exploitable fear of others." Whether a migrant is in this country legally or illegally, the odds of them committing criminal acts are much lower than those for [...]

This is it: we're about to lock in our order quantity for One Billion Users, the competitive card game about running a social media network that we funded on Kickstarter last year. If you haven't yet become a backer of the campaign, you can still make a late pledge to order as many copies as [...]

As recently noted, authoritarian assholes don't like public broadcasting. Because they don't like the idea of untethering U.S. journalism from the perverse financial incentives inherent in our consolidated, billionaire-owned, ad-engagement based media system. If we bolstered real independent journalism or public broadcasting, you might see journalism more interested in telling people the truth. Yuck! That's [...]

You may have heard a mantra that is becoming more popular these days thanks to a certain presidential administration operating as a language-destroyer. It goes: Every accusation is a confession." The idea behind it is that when someone goes all firebrand accusing others of a thing, you often find the firebrand guilty of that very [...]

There will never be enough casual evil with this administration. Trump has already invoked the Alien Enemies Act to justify the extrajudicial renditioning of Venezuelan immigrants to a maximum security prison in [checks notes] El Salvador. Claiming that the mere presence of foreign gang members is an act of war has allowed the DHS, CBP, [...]

Support us on Patreon Though the original promise of the internet has been twisted and distorted, today we're seeing more and more people working to restore decentralization and user power online. One such person who sees the problem better than most is Flipboard founder and former Twitter board member (among many other things) Mike McCue, [...]

If you feel this nation is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyrannies of evil men, you probably should be scared shitless that the clowns are running the circus. Of course, those backing Trump aren't truly concerned about any of this, not even those running his agencies and/or repeating [...]

Harvard University took the extraordinary step ofsuing the Trump administrationon April 21, 2025, claiming that the pressure campaign mounted on the school by the president and his Cabinet to force viewpoint diversity on campus violated the Constitution's guarantees of free speech. Defendants' actions are unlawful," Harvard's lawsuit states. The First Amendment does not permit the [...]

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Last July, the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court handled a geofence warrant case, marking the first time this issue had been handled at the appellate level. The robbery suspect, Okello Chatrie, challenged the constitutionality of the warrant, arguing that its non-particular nature placed it outside the bounds of the Fourth Amendment. A half-decade ago, this argument [...]

Do you have what it takes to run a social media network that grows to one billion users and beyond? That's the question in our new card game, One Billion Users, which we successfully funded on Kickstarter last year. Now the game is entering production, and since we have no plans to make more copies [...]

We've covered for years the ugly retransmission feuds that break out between your cable company and broadcasters during contract negotiations. These fights routinely result in you losing access to channels you pay for with no real recourse. The FCC has perpetually refused to protect consumers from this stuff, taking a sort of boys will be [...]

It should be no secret that Comcast, as well as many other cable TV and internet providers, have a firm reputation for shoveling mountains of bullshit and calling it their base fees only to have a bunch of hidden or sneaky other fees attached to invoices that greatly inflate the price of services. These have [...]

At a time when Section 230 has become one of the most politically divisive tech policy issues, our final episode of the Otherwise Objectionable podcast brings together an unusual panel for a roundtable discussion" between myself, Jessica Melugin of CEI, Charles Cooke from the National Review, and Dave Willner (well-known trust & safety expert who [...]

Today Microsoft shut down Skype, a company that helped revolutionize phone calls online. To commemorate the death of Skype, we're running a recent Pessimist's Archive" article on the history of internet calls, and how it almost wasn't allowed. If you're not already, you should subscribe to the Pessimist's Archive. It used to cost money to [...]

In an unprecedented 102-page ruling that methodically dismantles the Trump administration's executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, Judge Beryl Howell has issued a permanent injunction that goes far beyond her initial temporary restraining order. The ruling represents a stark rebuke of what the court calls an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain [...]

Earlier this year, soon after Elon Musk began stripping away parts of the government he had no constitutional authority to destroy, we warned that it appeared officials in the White House were gearing up to use the Twitter Files playbook on the US government. The basics of the playbook are as follows: As Charlie Warzel [...]

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Things continue to change thanks to the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision. Prior to that, it was assumed the Third Party Doctrine justified all sorts of data dragnets, so long as the data was held by a third party. But that doctrine assumed the data being grabbed by law enforcement was being handed over knowingly and [...]

Washington will soon become theeighth statein the country to pass Right to Repair legislation. While U.S. consumer protection is generally an historic hot mess right now, the right to repair" movement - making it easier and cheaper to repair the things you own - continues to make steady inroads thanks to widespread, bipartisan annoyance at [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Bruce C. with a reply to a comment that attempted to downplay the recent behavior of federal agents: Even plain clothes officers are required to carry their badge. If they were undercover officers they shouldn't be presenting themselves as officers to civilians unless they [...]

As we announced last week, our recently-Kickstarted card game One Billion Users is about to enter production, which means this is your last chance to secure a copy for yourself. The Kickstarter campaign is accepting late pledges from now through the end of Wednesday, May 7th. We recently received our proof copy, and it looks [...]

This is the fourth 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, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals, and today we're looking at the winner of the Best Adaptation category: Calder's Circus by David Harris. Regular followers of [...]

One of things we've talked about repeatedly is how much better it would be for content producers, instead of immediately defaulting to behaving like IP protectionists, to treat their fans in a human and awesome way. There are times when the need for protecting IP makes sense, but there are far more times when creative [...]

The free, independent state of Texas continues to make it clear it only respects certain rights and freedoms and only those that adhere to the Holy Trinity of guns, God, and, um... Nazi-adjacent Cybertruck manufacturers. A number of efforts have been made to remove books from schools and public libraries in recent years. None of [...]

A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board reported an unusualspike in potentially sensitive data flowing outof the agency's network in early March 2025 when staffers from the Department of Government Efficiency, which goes by DOGE, were granted access to the agency's databases. On April 7, the Department of Homeland Securitygained accessto Internal Revenue Service [...]

Bizarrely buried near the bottom of NY Times article about the chaos behind the renditioning of people to a Salvadoran gulag is an important detail: the US and El Salvador have already brought back eight people who were mistakenly" sent there: In Washington, the Trump administration was working to address Mr. Bukele's confusion about whom [...]

This comes as no surprise. Pretty much everything about Trump's extrajudicial rendering of undocumented migrants to a foreign hellhole prison has been awful, but rarely lawful, to twist a phrase that's already pretty twisted. Resurrecting a law last used to justify the mass incarceration of migrants during World War II, Trump 2.0's acceleration of his [...]

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