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Every year, the President lays out the administration's major agenda in the State of the Union address. For those of us who cover tech policy, there's always some fear that something dumb will be said. In the last couple of years, Biden pushed nonsense moral panics about the evils of the internet. So, in some [...]

The NYPD has a problem with encryption, as do some of its preferred prosecutors. Back in 2010, Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism and Intelligence told NBC news reporters that the city was filled with terrorists willing to leverage everything from rocks, bottles, and accelerants" to wage war on New York - something aided by these speculative [...]

Dive into Godot - a rising star in the game engine world. You'll learn to create platformers, RPGs, strategy games, FPS games, and more as you master this free and open-source engine with easily expandable systems. Plus, you'll also explore techniques for game design and game asset creation - giving you the ultimate techniques to [...]

Can the 5th Circuit ever do anything not crazy? You may recall that Texas, like so many states, passed a law, HB 1181, that required age verification for adult content sites. This law also required nonsense health warnings" to be plastered on those sites, which did not come from any actual health experts. The Free [...]

While it seemed like our national policy hysteria over TikTok had waned slightly in 2024, it bubbled up once again last week upon rumors that the White House is supporting a welcome and important" new bill that would effectively ban TikTok from operating in the United States. The bipartisan bill (full text) - which moved [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Toom1275 with a comment about Missouri's new speech police: Teaching kids the reality that trans people exist and are normal is no more grooming them than teaching kids that frogs exist is grooming them to become amphibians. In second place, we've got a double-winning comment [...]

It's time for the second entry in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! We've already featrued Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station, and today we're taking a closer look at the winner of Best Adaptation: Mickey Party by Benjamin [...]

Remember Wordle? I sure do and one of the ways I start my days at work is to pull up the site and give it a quick play. But I honestly may just need to stop, given the behavior of the current owners of the game. For this discussion, you really do need to recall [...]

Just imagine how petty and vindictive you have to be to change someone with murder just because they weren't arrested easily. Imagine how self-centered you have to be to present someone as an assailant just because they were unable to comprehend your instructions. Imagine just how inhumane you have to be to present a false [...]

Last fall, we wrote about Yelp going to court in California to try to block Texas's indicted and facing trial shortly Attorney General Ken Paxton from suing the company for using its speech to accurately warn users that Crisis Pregnancy Centers" do not generally offer any actual medical care. As you may know, anti-abortion advocates [...]

Say what you will about the general politeness of Canadians and the genteel nature of their secondhand Britishness, but never forget their cops can be just as petty and vindictive as our cops. Law enforcement entities everywhere have a massive sense of entitlement. Officers and officials tend to think that people should comply with whatever [...]

This DevDojo Pro subscription gives you access to a set of tools to help you build your next great idea. Start with the Page Creator, where you'll find Tailwind CSS Page Builder, a tool for crafting beautiful landing pages. Then, move on to Wave SAAS Starter Kit, where you'll learn how to build your Software [...]

Flooding Congress with phone calls can work wonders to stop bad bills at times. The SOPA blackout 12 years ago was one of the most effective advocacy campaigns in history. Coincidentally, I was at the Capitol that day, and wandering the halls between meetings, hearing phones ringing non-stop was amazing. However, that process was carefully [...]

Aging satellite TV provider Dish Network is supposed to be undergoing a major transformation from tired old satellite TV provider to streaming and wireless juggernaut. It was a cornerstone of a Trump administration FCC and DOJ plan to cobble together a new wireless carrier out of twine and vibes as a counter-balance to the competition-eroding [...]

It's a point we have to make far more often than we should: trademark law is not designed to allow anyone or any company to simply lock up common language as their own. There are lots of ways the confusion around that expresses itself, but one of the most common concerns generic terms for goods [...]

Axon, most famous for producing Tasers, is again making the sort of headlines it really shouldn't make. Everyone knows Taser. The company produces the most-used less lethal" weapons cops deploy. Less" is the key word here. It's basically a cattle prod for humans but one that's routinely deployed with less care than a cattle prod, [...]

Senator Ron Wyden is a one-man defense for preventing horrible bills from moving forward in the Senate. Last month, he stopped Josh Hawley from moving a very problematic STOP CSAM bill from moving forward, and now he's had to do it again. A (bipartisan) group of senators traipsed to the Senate floor Wednesday evening. They [...]

Florida legislators - urged on by failed presidential candidate and governor for life" hopeful Ron DeSantis - have passed plenty of unconstitutional laws in hopes of marginalizing or silencing anyone who isn't straight, white, or voting straight-ticket Republican. Much like it's true anyone can break any law they like until they get caught, legislators can [...]

One frustrating thing in following everything that has happened in the case that started out as Missouri v. Biden and is now Murthy v. Missouri at the Supreme Court, is that the case is full of lies. The whole case is kind of a mess for a variety of reasons. This includes the original plaintiffs [...]

The Complete 2024 CompTIA Certification Training Super Bundle by IDUNOVA has 15 courses to help you prepare for various CompTIA certification exams. Courses cover everything from the fundamentals to cloud essentials to cybersecurity. The bundle is on sale for $59.97. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all [...]

I'm super excited to announce our brand new podcast, created in partnership with Ben Whitelaw, who runs the brilliant Everything in Moderation newsletter: Ctrl-Alt-Speech. It's a weekly news podcast that Ben and I will be co-hosting, exploring what's happening in the world of online speech. It will cover issues related to trust & safety, content [...]

When last we checked in with Hewlett Packard (HP), the companyhad just been sued(for the second time) for crippling customer printers if owners attempt to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. It was just the latest in a long saga where printer manufacturers use DRM or dodgy software updates to wage all out war on consumer [...]

Whatever your thoughts on policing in general in America, I would hope it would be largely uncontroversial to state that a huge percentage of Americans believe that police are generally over-militarized and at least slightly a little too trigger happy, especially when it comes to engaging minority communities. If you somehow think that there isn't [...]

As we've noted for a very long time, sometimes dumb" tech is often the smarter option. In the rush to connect every conceivable technology and device to the internet (while seeing ever-improving revenues), smart technology" companies routinely cut corners. And the first sacrifice usually made (behind customer service) tends to be consumer privacy and device [...]

It might not be the smartest idea to have Walter Isaacson trailing you and taking notes on your everyday moves when one of those moves is trying to breach the contract the top execs of the social media company you just overpaid for on a whim. In his book on Musk, Isaacson talked about how [...]

The gracious leeway of the Terry stop - as set down by the Supreme Court's 1968 decision - gave a lot a law enforcement agencies a permission slip for suspicionless stops of pedestrians. Random people got braced, patted down, aggressively questioned, and otherwise hassled. Very few arrests followed. Very little contraband was discovered. But it [...]

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It's no secret that I'm often skeptical of antitrust actions, many of which feel like bureaucrats doing a general punishment" for disliking a successful company, rather than an actual response to abusive, anti-competitive behavior by a large company. However, that does not mean that there is no place for antitrust enforcement. It's just that it [...]

The FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, currently provides 23+ million low-income Americans a $30 broadband discount every month. While it didn't get much hype, that's a big deal in a country where broadband affordability is a massive obstacle to adoption due to muted competition and high service prices. But [...]

Usually when we discuss trademark disputes, we tend to highlight examples and stories where the dispute is initiated by a party where we really, really don't think they have much of a leg to stand on. This story is different in that respect. In India, an eBike company called Yulu has sued a company called [...]

Amazon's home surveillance tech acquisition, Ring, wanted to be all things to everyone. But mostly, it wanted to be BFFs with law enforcement. Providing homeowners with an easy way to surveil their own doorsteps and driveways was enough for Ring for a little while. Then, following its acquisition by Amazon, it began to portray itself [...]

Anyone who follows Techdirt knows we're very interested in the progress of Bluesky, the decentralized social network that embraces our concept of protocols over platforms. Bluesky recently ended its invite-only beta and opened its doors to the public, so it seems like a great time for a check-in, and who better to check in with [...]

A few weeks ago, Prof. James Grimmelmann and (former Techdirt) journalist Tim Lee wrote a piece for Ars Technica, stating why the NY Times might win its copyright lawsuit against OpenAI. It's no secret that I'm skeptical of the underpinnings of the lawsuit and think the NY Times is being silly in filing it, but [...]

Like highway patrol officers bitching about the fact they couldn't talk a driver into a voluntary search, a British censorship board is complaining about the fact they can't get US companies to comply with takedown requests they're under no legal obligation to comply with. That's the gist of this article, as reported by Laurie Clarke [...]

The Apple Watch Wireless Charger Keychain is the perfect accessory for Apple Watch users on-the-go. With a built-in 950mAh lithium-ion battery, it can charge all series of Apple Watch. The technology allows it to be used as a base for a bedside table or table for convenient charging. Its portable, pocket-size design makes it easy [...]

It appears that Meta is serious about no longer bribing news orgs to keep corrupt politicians from forcing them to engage in sketchy wealth transfer schemes to news orgs. While it caved in the past in Australia and paid off news orgs there, the company is informing news orgs that they won't be renewing the [...]

We've noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate AI" into journalism have proven to be acomical mess, resulting in no shortage ofshoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It's thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and [...]

While I'm mildly surprised by this, at least it's a pleasant surprise. Almost exactly a year ago rapper Eminem opposed the trademark for the Reasonably Shady" podcast, which is itself a product of Gizelle Bryant and Robyn Dixon, both of whom were on Real Houswives of Potomac. The opposition itself is quite silly, with Em's [...]

The leader in gunshot detection tech rebranded recently. Following several months of sustained negative press, ShotSpotter decided it wanted to be called something else: SoundThinking. But a raffelesia by any other name smells the same. ShotSpotter had experienced a bit of quick uptake by law enforcement agencies, but in recent years, it was more well-known [...]

Republican state Rep. Jamie Gragg of Ozark is a freshman lawmaker with no discernible accomplishments on his record. However, it isn't to say that the man doesn't break from the party line when it comes to the Republican Party's fascistic campaign against transgender rights. Gragg introduced House Bill (HB) 2885. It makes it a sex [...]

Do you remember Irell & Manella? Of course you do. It's the formerly well-respected law firm that once brought a lawsuit on behalf of PETA claiming (incorrectly) to represent a monkey, which it claimed (incorrectly) could hold a copyright. As we noted at the time, the whole reason that a respected firm like Irell would [...]

Courtesy of Solar Opposites (imho the funniest show on streaming TV), here's what happens when you teach a cop how to read: To quote the relevant part for those who can't view the video or would just prefer me to put my cop-hating in plain text, here it is. Yumyulack, an alien, is trying to [...]

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I had thought that maybe, just maybe, now that DeSantis had dropped out of the Presidential race, maybe (just maybe?) he'd stop pushing blatantly unconstitutional laws. That's not to say that DeSantis has any good ideas. But it felt like over the last few years, he really leaned into the nonsense culture wars in an [...]

There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn't pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despitea parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congressis too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous reply to a complaint about Biden sinking the ship of the US: Racking up the votes for second place, it's an anonymous comment about lessons from the Vice Media collapse: That's the root of 90% of our problems as a nation. Quarter-to-quarter [...]

Earlier this week, we announced the winners of the 6th annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! Now, as in years past, for the next few Saturdays we'll be featuring spotlight posts taking a closer look at each of the winning games (in no particular order). Today, we're kicking things off with the [...]

Usually when you hear the term trademark bully" tossed around, it's done so either by members of the media, such as us here at Techdirt, or by defense attorneys making a point before the court. In the case of The Florida Virtual School, however, that moniker was given to the company by the judge that [...]

Going way, way back, we've talked about the need for protection of journalistic sources, in particular the need for a federal journalism shield law. I can find stories going back about 15 years of us talking about it here on Techdirt. The issue might not come up that often, but that doesn't make it any [...]

As the Vice collapse and Messenger collapse just got done illustrating in glorious technicolor, the problem with online U.S. journalism isn't that it's not inherently profitable. The problem is usually that the worst, least competent, shallowest people imaginable routinely fail upward into positions of management, then treat the media companies they acquire and operate like [...]